CULTURAL LITERACY: WHAT EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO KNOW
E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987
251 pp., $16.95
A state, John Henry Newman wrote over a century ago, is in its very idea a society, and a society is a collection of many individuals made one by their participation in some common possession, and the extent of that common possession, held in common, constitutes the life, and the loss of it constitutes the dissolution, of a state.
We can profitably apply this statement to present circumstances that were already in process but not as evident or advanced in the Victorian era by considering the same insight with regard to 'culture.' This is what E.D. Hirsch has done in his fine book on contemporary American education, Cultural Literacy, a volume that has deservedly attracted critical attention and a wide readership. Like the great ethical English Victorians, Hirsch is concerned with the res publica of our culture as it is expressed and institutionalized in school curricula and texts. He has written a civic-spirited book that attempts both to diagnose the problem of our growing illiteracy and cultural confusion and to prescribe a possible remedy--this last being a bold and refreshing departure from merely or mainly analytical or negative descriptions of our crisis.
And crisis it is, whether we choose to see it as chronic or acute. Hirsch quotes as evidence of the "decline of literate knowledge" in this country not only numerous authoritative statistical surveys, but also a haunting appraisal of general literacy and cultural awareness among Los Angeles high school and college students by Benjamin Stein. Stein's appraisal concludes that these "kids... are not mentally prepared to continue [our] society because they basically do not understand the society well enough to value it." To this we might add Juvenal's assertion that "affluence is more ruthless than war"; but Stein's words are ominous enough to deserve to be meditated upon by everyone literate enough to read this page.
Hirsch's book documents this decline in general, shared cultural knowledge, assumptions, and context, this diminution of our American res publica. Over the past quarter-century it has been replaced by an ersatz, ephemeral, repulsive, often openly destructive popular culture based on television, advertising, pop music, and the vulgar democratism of "market outcomes": Whatever sells is good, and becomes coin of the realm in the cultural world, too. From various perspectives, we have had numerous powerful analyses and critiques of this ersatz "culture," of its roots and fruits, in recent years, comprising an admirable and distinguished body of literature--extended works such as Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. Richard Neuhaus's Naked Public Square, and William Barrett's Death of the Soul. And sometimes even titles alone are revealing and valuable, as in the case of a recent book on rock music called The Triumph of Vulgarity, not to mention The Closing of the American Mind. Nor has there been any lack of incisive short assessments of major aspects of this toxic ersatz culture: Clifton Fadiman's "the Classroom's Ubiquitous Rival: Pop Culture" (New York Times, 13 June 1979), Michael Novak's "The Revolt Against Our Public Culture" (National Review, 4 May 1984), and Richard West's "Permissiveness Destroys" (London
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