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dl& WHAT EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO KNOW E. D. Hirsch, Jr. I :. With an Updated Appendix I WHAT LITERATE AMERICANS KNOW E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Joseph Kett James Trefil Vintage Books A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK Rousseau points out the facility with which children lend them- selves to our false methods: . . . "The apparent ease with which .children learn is their ruin." -JOHN DEWEY r There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sir, while you stand consid- ering which of two things you should teach your child first,' another boy has learn't 'em both. - SAMUEL JOHNSON To be cultllrally literate is to possess the basic information needed . to thrive in the modern world. The breadth of that information,is great, extending over the major domains of human activitys from sports to science. It is by no means confined to "culture" narrowly I - understoodas an acquaintance with the arts. Nor is it confined to one social class. Quite the contrary. Cultural literacy constitutes - i ' the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the. I only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now I condemns them to remain in the same social and educational con- ' dition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes. tend tosremain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our ' schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept 1: .but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented cur- l riculum based on faulty educational theories. Some say that our I ( schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty I and illiteracy. I do not agree. They can break the cycle, but only if I i they themselves break fundamentally with some of the theories and 1 ; practices that education professors and school administrators have : followed over the past fifty years. $7 ... Xlllxiv Preface i Preface ' xv Although the chief beneficiaries of the educational reforms ad- vocated in this book will be disadvantaged children, these same reforms will also enhance the literacy of children from middle-class homes. The educational goal advocated is that of mature literacy for all our citizens. The connection between mature literacy and cultural literacy hay already be familiar to those who have closely followed recent dis- cussions of education. Shortly after the publication of my essay "Cultural Literacy," Dr. William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and subsequently secre- tary of education in President Ronald Reagan's second administra- tion, championed its ideas. This endorsement from an influential person of conservative views gave my ideas some currency, but such an endorsement was not likely to recommend the concept to liberal thinkers, and in fact the idea of cultural literacy has been attacked by some liberals on the assumption that I must be advocating a list of great books that every child in the land should be forced to read. But those who examine the Appendix to this book will be able to judge for themselves how thoroughly mistaken such an assump- tion is. Very few specific titles appear on the list, and they usually appear as words, not works, because they represent writings that culturally literate people have read about but haven't read. Das Kapital is a good example. Cultural literacy is represented not by a prescriptive list of books but rather by a descriptive list of the information actually possessed by literate Americans. My aim in this book is to contribute to making that information the possession of all Americans. The importance of such widely shared information can best be understood if I explain briefly how the idea of cultural literacy relates to currently prevailing theories of education. The theories that have dominated American education for the past fifty years stem ultimately from Jean Jatques Rousseau, who believed that we should encourage the natural development of young children and not impose adult ideas upon them before they can truly understand 1 them. Rousseau's conception of education as a process of natural development was an abstract generalization meant to apply to all children in any time or place: to French children of the eighteenth century or to Japanese or American children of the twentieth cen- tury. He thought that a child's intellectual and social skills would develop naturally without regard to the specific content of educa- tion. His content-neutral conception of educational development has long been triumphant in American schools of education and has long dominated the "developmental," content-neutral curricula of our elementary schools. In the first decades of this century, Rousseau's ideas powerfully influenced the educational conceptions of John Dewey, the writer who has most deeply affected modem American educational theory and practice. Dewey's clearest and, in his time, most widely read book on education, Schools of To-morrow, acknowledges Rousseau as the chief source of his educational principles. The first chapter of Dewey's book carries the telling title "Education as Natural Development" and is sprinkled with quotations from Rousseau. In it Dewey strongly seconds Rousseau's opposition to the mere ac- cumulation of information. < Development emphasizes the need of intimate and extensive personal acquaintance with a small number of typical situa- tions with a view to mastering the way of dealing with the problems of experience, not the piling up of information.' Believing that a few direct experiences would suffice to develop the skills that children require, Dewey assumed that early education need not be tied to specific content. He mistook a half-truth for the whole. He placed too much faith in children's ability to learn general skills from a few typical experiences and too hastily rejected "the piling up of information." Only by piling up specific, conlmunally shared information can children learn to participate in complex cooperative activities with other members of their community. This old truth, recently rediscovered, requires a countervailing theory of education that once again stresses the importance of spe- cific information in early and


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EVERGREEN MIT 2007 - Cultural Literacy

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