despite this diversity in our schools, there is nonetheless an unstated body of information that is assumed by
writers of books, magazines, training manuals, and newspapers. They assume, they must assume, a "common
reader" who knows the things that are known by other literate persons in the culture.

But to an illiterate adult who is unaware of what literate persons are expected to know, such assumptions by
writers could be regarded as a conspiracy of the literate against the illiterate, for the purpose of keeping them
out of the club. Although newspaper reporters, writers of books, and the framers of the Verbal SAT test
necessarily make assumptions about the things that literate persons should know, no one ever announces what
that body of information is. So, although we Americans object to pronouncements from on high about what we
should know, writers and other people in influential positions necessarily assume that there is a body of
information which literate people do know. And this creates a kind of silent dictating from on high about the
things adults should know in order to be truly literate.

Some decades ago there appeared in Britain a charming book called 1066 and All That. It dealt with facts of
British history that had been learned by every British schoolchild, but which had become scrambled and
confused in the adult mind. The book was hilarious to Britons, because their memories were not quite as, vague
and scrambled as the versions of history presented in the book. These Britons knew all too well that their
school knowledge had become vague with the passage of time, but, of course, this forgetting of minor details
didn’t make them less literate than they had been as children. Background information of the sort that is
needed for true literacy is neither detailed nor expert information, though it is accurate in its outlines.

In our own country, Noah Webster's language publications starting in 1783 and culminating in the great
American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828, were declarations of cultural and linguistic independence that
reflected our independent nationhood. Webster was the George Washington of American literacy; his American
Spelling Book alone sold 60 million copies before 1890. He was shrewdly conscious of the connections between
language-making, culture-making, and nation-making. Because of Webster, and other educators who thought as
he did, the teaching of literacy in America was, early on, a repository not only of our national language, but also
of national traditions, facts, and values.

In contrast to this early American practice of imparting nationally shared traditions along with instruction in
reading and writing, we encounter the more recent practice of teaching literacy as a set of technical skills. There
“is enough truth in the idea that literacy is a set of transferable skills to make such educational formalism a
respectable, if inadequate, theory to hold. But it should be added that in recent times this skills approach has
also been a safe theory to hold. Specialists in reading and writing who adopt the skills approach needn't
commit themselves to any particular contents or values, except the values of so-called "pluralism." They can
present themselves as technicians who remain above the cultural battle. This posture of neutral expertness Is
nowhere better illustrated than in the official curriculum guides of certain states (for instance, the state of

California) which mention, as do these so-called "curriculum guides," no specific contents at all. In earlier days,
American educators carefully combined the technical skills of reading and writing with background knowledge,
that is to say, with the acculturative side of literacy teaching. But in our own day, after fifty years of the skills-
approach, and despite the advances we have made in reading research and in educating the disadvantaged, we .
find a decline in SAT scores and an apparent increase in cultural fragmentation.

We all know that our continuing failure to achieve a high level of national literacy insures a continuing lack of
subtlety in the communications that we can transmit widely in speeches, books and newspapers by means of the
national language. Even a training manual, for instance, can be much more effective and functional if it can
assume a readership that is culturally literate. Moreover, we know that a low standard of literacy debases not
only the level of general culture, but also the level of political discussion and of technical and economic
effectiveness. The time has come for Americans to be decisive and explicit and specific about the background
information that a citizen should know in order to be literate in the 1980s. If we were to act decisively to define
cultural literacy, then adult literacy would rise as a matter of course.

B.D. Hirsch; Ir.
University of Virginia

For further information, contact the author at the Department of English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville,
Virginia 22903.

 

Suanne 2. Roueche, Editor
April 4, 1986, Vol. VII, No. 10

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