This week's issue of Newsweek magazine looks back 20 years to the publication of E.D. Hirsch's book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and the furor that surrounded it. Hirsch contended in his book that there is a certain essential body of knowledge that every American needs in order to understand what is going on in the world around him (or her). At the time, Hirsch was roundly criticized by many who viewed his list of basic elements of cultural literacy as being insufficiently inclusive of diverse, multicultural information.
I, of course, loved it.
Newsweek has used the 20th anniversary of the publication of Cultural Literacy to again raise the issue of what we need to know to function as aware, involved citizens in the 21st century...to understand the historical and cultural meaning of events. An example used in the article is the comparison of Iraq to Vietnam - if you don't know about the war in Vietnam (and many young people today don't), the meaning of the comparison will be lost.
I've believed for many years that cultural and historical literacy are very important. Back in the mid-80's when I was taking the Air Force's Air Command and Staff College correspondence course, one of the required readings was a fascinating article by Benjamin Stein titled Valley Girls View the World. In that article, Mr Stein described the lack of knowledge of history, geography, and general culture evidenced by the friends of his teenaged daughter. He noted that, among other things, many of these young ladies didn't know who won the Civil War, or even when the Civil War was fought.
By the way, if you didn't understand the meaning of the term valley girl, you too are lacking an element of cultural literacy...the little piece that helps you understand that a valley girl is a young, unsophisticated woman, stereotypically from California, happily living in a sheltered world of friends, entertainment, and shopping without an understanding of events in the larger world around her.
In one of my earliest posts to this blog, I wrote about a friendly young waitress in a hotel restaurant in Colorado Springs who asked a customer where he was visiting from. When he answered, "Qatar," she asked, "Where's that?" At the time (and still today), I was a little shocked that she didn't recognize the name of a Gulf emirate where many American troops are stationed as part of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's part of cultural literacy.
No one will ever be able to agree on a single list of things every American needs to know. The country is too big, too diverse, and changes too rapidly to make such a list worthwhile to compile. But the need is clear: there are things we all need to know to make sense of events. There is essential information we need to make informed economic, political, and social decisions if we are to be active, involved, aware citizens.
Unfortunately, many Americans not only don't have such cultural literacy...they aren't even aware they're lacking it.
And that bodes ill for the future.
Read the July 9th issue of Newsweek and think about whether you are culturally literate. You need to be.
Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.
Bilbo
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