Appendixitis Cultural Literacy

By Stefan Kanfer

What is Brownian motion? Who said we should burn with a hard, gemlike flame? How do you translate the phrase comme il faut? Failure to answer questions like these signifies a catastrophic ignorance, according to E.D. Hirsch Jr., a professor of English at the University of Virginia and inventor of the latest intellectual parlor game.

Hirsch did not set out to produce an entertainment. But this summer, readers seem eager for masochistic diversions. Another finger-wagging polemic about American education, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for eleven weeks. Cultural Literacy is equally cranky, and it has already made best-seller lists in New York City, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston.

Hirsch establishes his dour tone early on by distinguishing between literacy (the ability to read one's own language) and cultural literacy (possession of specific information). Students may be able to read at a ninth-grade level, according to Hirsch, and still be ignorant of history and society. He quotes a Latin pupil astonished to find that she is learning a dead language. "What do they speak in Latin America?" she demands. A California journalist testifies, "I have not yet found one single student in Los Angeles, in either college or high school, who could tell me the years when World War II was fought." The Federal Government's Foundations of Literacy project recently tested 17- year-olds; samplings show that half cannot identify Stalin or Churchill.

Hirsch proposes to recover what has been lost: a set of common references. "The more computers we have," he maintains, "the more we need shared fairy tales, Greek myths, historical images, and so on." The reason for this seeming paradox is that "if we do not achieve a literate society, the technicians, with their arcane specialties, will not be able to communicate with us nor we with them. That would contradict the basic principles of democracy and must not be allowed to happen."

Stripped of its apocalyptic tone, what this amounts to is an advocacy of teaching names, dates and places by rote and providing a context later. Hirsch acknowledges that the method has been derided since Dickens satirized Pedant Thomas Gradgrind ("Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!") in Hard Times. But, he counters, "it isn't facts that deaden the minds of young children, who are storing facts in their minds every day with astonishing voracity. It is incoherence -- our failure to ensure that a pattern of shared, vividly taught, and socially enabling knowledge will emerge from our instruction."

And exactly what knowledge will be vividly taught? Cultural Literacy is obviously meant to provoke serious debate. But when it leaves the theoretical and lands on the practical, it executes a pratfall. Hirsch and two academic colleagues offer a 64-page appendix of references that constitutes their version of vital information. They never do get around to telling the reader that Brownian motion is a random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases, that Walter Pater said we should burn with a hard gemlike flame and that comme il faut means proper. They are too busy moving their curriculum between the trendy and the arbitrary. Why, for example, is Sartre listed but not Camus? Why Norman Mailer but not Saul Bellow or John Updike? Leonardo but not Michelangelo? Venereal disease but not AIDS? Why Beverly Hills but not St. Louis? Cole Porter but not Leonard Bernstein? Muammar Gaddafi but not Francois Mitterrand? Bogart but not Olivier or even Cagney? Such questions guarantee that the book will indeed spur discussions all summer long, but perhaps not the ones the author intended.