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An argument for establishing a core curriculum of the basic information everyone needs to know, based on the author's hypothesis that being culturally literate is the foundation of intellectual competence.

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CHOICE Review

Rare is the book in which readers go first to the appendix and devour it with gusto from start to finish. That is what happens, however, with Hirsch's Cultural Literacy. The 63-page appendix contains alphabetical lists, from ``abbreviation'' to ``Zurich,'' of names and terms that educated people should know. Hirsch's book, a logical addendum to The Philosophy of Composition (CH, Apr '78), has to do with how people read and perceive. Hirsch thinks the greatest impediment to learning is the lack of a common base of knowledge, without which it is impossible for people to understand their cultures. This book, like Hirsch's earlier book on composition, is conservative, probably a reaction to the educationally freewheeling 1960s, when books like Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969) held sway. But even Postman extinguished some of his own liberal fire in Teaching as a Conserving Activity (CH, Feb '80), which is the flip side of his earlier book. Cultural Literacy is thoughtful, intelligent, and provocative. Well written, fun to read, it is unique in being simultaneously accessible to general readers and all academic levels. It is required reading for the professional educator. Useful index; unobtrusive documentation.-R.B. Shuman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Booklist Review

A University of Virginia English professor makes an invaluable contribution to the debate on American education by insisting that literacy lies not merely in the bare skills of reading and writing, but also in the informational context of those skills. He maintains that our schools produce ineffective communicators because they fail to acquaint children with the common knowledge of American culture e.g., who Robert E. Lee or J. Edgar Hoover was; where Washington, D.C., or Chicago is; what the Bill of Rights or a grand jury is. Not knowing such things, a person will not understand much of what the news media convey, nor even the mundane allusions made in informal speech and even business correspondence. After an impressive presentation of the evidence and argumentation for his views, Hirsch concludes by proposing a broad scheme of curricular revision to restore cultural content to American education. Appended as a guide to what literate Americans ought to know is a long list of terms, names, and sayings that Hirsch compiled in consultation with historian Joseph Kett and physicist James Trefil. Notes; to be indexed. RO. 370.19 Literacy U.S. / Educational anthropology U.S. / Culture [OCLC] 86-21352

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Hirsch is a conservative critic best known for his repudiation of critical approaches to literature (chiefly poststructuralism and New Criticism) that assume that the author's intentions do not determine readings. He argues that any such methodology is guilty of "the organic fallacy," the belief that the text leads a life of its own. For Hirsch, the author's authority is the key to literary interpretation: The critic's job is to reproduce textual meaning by recovering the author's consciousness, which guarantees the validity of an interpretation.

In his two most important books, Validity in Interpretation (1967) and its sequel, The Aims of Interpretation (1976), Hirsch warns against the "critical anarchy" that follows from the "cognitive atheism" of both relativism and subjectivism. For him, these result from a corollary of the organic fallacy, the thesis that meaning is ultimately indeterminate because it changes over time or with the differing interests and values of different readers. According to Hirsch, meaning does not change; only value or significance does, as readers relate a text's fixed meaning to their cultures. If there is more than one valid interpretation of a text, it is because literature may be reduced to more than one "intrinsic genre" or meaning type---the particular set of conventions governing ways of seeing and of making meaning at the time the author was writing.

Many critics suggest that the intentions Hirsch recovers in intrinsic genres are really his own, rather than those of the author, because no one, including Hirsch, can escape his or her historically conditioned frame of reference when developing interpretations of literature. Hirsch's recent books, including Cultural Literacy (1987), are seen as proof of those flaws by those who are troubled by the history and values of the dominant culture that Hirsch insists is the only culture. Hirsch argues that "common knowledge" is being denied minority students and others by feminists and other "radicals" who have undermined the authority of its great texts.

(Bowker Author Biography)