Cultural Literacy

Debi Moon
Pam Moolenaar- Wirsiy
Cultural Literacy

In Cultural Literacy, E D Hirsch analyzes

Americas failure to achieve a higher
degree of literacy.
Basics of the Hirsch Book

First, literacy requires beyond basic

reading and writing skills, the common
body of information that is possessed by
the General Society
Second, it is the responsibility of the
schools to impart the shared information
Basics of the Hirsch book

Third, to dismiss such education as elitist

or indoctrination is to fail to see it as
empowerment for only the culturally
literate can hope to affect social reform
Basics of the Hirsch book

Fourth, education must involve a two-part

curriculum: extensive ( covering the shared
information) and intensive ( allowing for in-
depth exploration of individual text or specific
areas of knowledge) .
This two-part curriculum avoids the idea that all
should study identical materials; it also resists
the idea of a core curriculum
Two-part curriculum

The two-part curriculum- extensive and

intensive- seems suited to develop the
interrelated goals of cultural literacy and
critical thinking
Is inadequate however for the fostering of
the creative intelligence that is rooted in
the imagination.
 Literate culture has become the common
currency for social and economic
exchange. In other words, it is is the only
available ticket to full-citizenship;
membership is automatic if one learns the
background information and a linguistic
skills needed to read, writing, and speak
effectively (According to Hirsch)
Knowledge and lists

Hirsch proposes being literate as a matter

of covering the territory of huge cultural
literacy lists
He assures us it is quite small.
Frankly or take a few hundred pages to
describe the simplest of idea such as
eating at a restaurant.
The imagination

The imagination is the faculty responsible

for major breakthroughs in theoretical
science. The power that a man has over
nature himself and that a dog lacks, lies in
this command of imaginary experience--
he alone has a symbols which fix the past
and played at the future, possible and
impossible.
The imagination
Finally the imagination is the faculty by which we
can envision a new society in which the evils of
the present will be ameliorated or at least
exchanged for lesser evils.

Percy Bysshe Shelley the creation of a new

society is the crowning achievement of the poetic
imagination and poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.
Testing

Because schools teach to test they emphasize

the memorization of facts and formulas.
The really important tests are mass-produced
and mass graded thus theyre populating
questions that have simple objective answers.
As a result our national definition of what it
means to be educated translates into how
readily one could recognize the right word
among five options listed in a multiple-choice
question.
World winner

We should be discouraged about trying to

win the unofficial world test scores
competition. Instead we should measure
the success in our educational system by
whether or not we are producing
graduates who internalize the ability and
desire to learn.
Sign of success

The best sign of a successful education

system would be that students want to go
to school, they remain excited about
learning once they get there, and that in
the end, they are prepared to creatively
respond to the kind of open ended
problems they will actually face them in
the world.
Why our college students act the
way they do
When successes of the system arrive in college
they fear open ended assignments. They are
impatient with discussions that are not going in
any particular direction except for the interests
of the discussants dictate, since they know that
such discussions waste time that could be better
spent studying for a test.
What they learned is the way to get along in the
world is to cater to points of view of educational
authorities.
Types of knowledge needed for
communication

Make simple inferences

Establish causal connections
Recognize stereotyped situations
Access and utilize raw facts
Track peoples goals
Recognize thematic relationships between
individuals and society
Thus learning facts alone is not enough to
effectively communicate
Testing to the facts

To the extent that we believe that there

are facts everyone must know, we will
create exams to test that people know
them.
Such exams will inevitably disrupt natural
learning.
Real-life learning

People have natural mechanisms for learning to

allow them to master an enormous volume of
material during their lifetimes.
Some people learn enough baseball statistics to
fill a book. Others learn which political strategies
great leaders employed and which strategies
worked and almost everyone learns where milk
is in their neighborhood grocery store as well a s
to navigate streets of their hometown.
Whats wrong in class

Classes teaching reading still have all the

students reading the same book as if it were the
book and not the reading that mattered
Classes teaching math often present math is
something the useful at some point later in life,
rather than as something that applies to students
and their immediate concerns.
Classes teaching history rarely show how the
lesson for the past informs students choices
today.
Problem of today
The primary problems is the schools dependence on
fixed curricula, the stranglehold of standardized testing,
an impossibility of giving individual attention with high
student-teacher ratios
The goal is to take the natural interests of each student
and use that as a vehicle for teaching what we want
students to learn.
If the student likes trucks why not teach them to read
about trucks, do the math is needed to understand fuel
economies, and know the economics and politics needed
to run a trucking company?
You learn every day

People learn every day and they manage

to learn without making it an academic
affair.
What have you learned today?
 The secret why people are able to learn so much
in their daily lives is really no secret at all. They
learn about things to reach their goals; they
learn about things in which they are
interested ;because theyre interested they try
things out and sometimes fail; these failures
cause them to ask questions ;sometimes these
questions use outside sources like books ;we
develop the question and are ready to learn the
answer; once we developed an answer we have
little trouble remembering
 Schools present generalizations before
specifics but a generalization is really only
valuable if you make it yourself
The reason for this is simple enough:
generalizations come from cases, lots of
cases ,if you teach them a generalization
formula that it better be useful nearly
every day or youll forget it.
 In order to take advantage of students
natural learning abilities we must provide
an environment which supports them
pursuing goals of interest that allows them
to try things out initially rather than be
given answers; they should generate their
own questions.
Curiosity

In his essay the Loss of the Creature the

novelist Walker Percy contrasts when learning
arises naturally versus in the classroom
A young islander walking along the beach and
spying a dead fish and going to work on with his
jackknife in a fashion wholly unprovided in
modern educational theory has a great
advantage over a Scarsdale high school student
who finds a fish on his laboratory desk with a list
of what he needs and all the steps involved. It
kills curiosity