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E.D. HIRSCH'S Cultural Literacy has received so much media play that many who have not read it may nonetheless think they have. And many who think they have read it are likely to rely more on their own political orientation than on the totality of Hirsch's statements to evaluate what they have read. One of Hirsch's major points is that the reader's background is crucial to the experience of reading. Nothing so neatly illustrates this point as Hirsch's book itself.

Critics cite the now famous “list of cultural literacy” in the appendix and chuckle at the fatuity of reducing cultural knowledge to an alphabetized list of facts. Supporters herald the book as a beautifully written love poem to the American identity—especially to Hirsch's traditional, often nostalgic, interpretation of that identity—and its importance in schooling our young; they tout the book, as does Hirsch himself, as furnishing the arguments and evidence that are needed to cement, once and for all, the sacred bonds between our cultural unity and our national literacy.

Few can question the problem that stirs Hirsch's concern and informs his vision: a literate public needs a common background to ensure efficient communication and social organization. Today's youth are being schooled without such a background. Therefore the conditions for nurturing literacy are in eclipse. It's hard to dispute Hirsch's efficiency argument. Anyone who has taught reading or writing (and assigned both) knows how little can be expected from students who are still grappling with basic content. Culturally ignorant students must ask too many questions to engage in serious reading and writing tasks as authors themselves. From this meager observation springs a haunting question: How do we teach students a culture, a common social coin, as a prelude to more advanced literacy?

Hirsch's list may strike the critic as a woefully unsophisticated answer. But Hirsch himself suggests that the sophistication of his list lies more in its explicitness than in anything else (134). And, on this point, he is dead right. By aiming to be explicit, Hirsch's answer is already better than any modern alternative. Teaching cultural knowledge is not the same as stressing the importance of culture or as expecting students (somewhat unrealistically) to induce their culture whole cloth from assigned reading matter.

By dismissing Hirsch's list as a crackpot solution for cultural literacy, critics of Hirsch will miss the intellectual challenge he is issuing: How can one find a better definition of cultural literacy that is at least as cogent in its diagnosis and at least as compelling in the simplicity of its solution? As Robert Pattison writes in his thoughtful review of Hirsch:

Indeed, what is most gripping about Hirsch's solution is not its claim of feasibility but its air of inevitability, even invincibility. It is easy to criticize Hirsch, but not to out-implement him. Criticisms that poke holes sans alternatives only add to the mystique that Hirsch's solution, however flawed, “is the only one that can work” (714).

Let me now sketch what I believe are the seeds of a practical alternative to Hirsch's challenge. The need for my alternative is made evident by Hirsch's attempt to distinguish an “extensive” from an “intensive” curriculum. For Hirsch, the teaching of cultural literacy (cultural facts and associations) is part of what he calls the extensive curriculum, a curriculum focused on breadth. What is learned in the extensive curriculum forms the intellectual basis for what is taught in the intensive curriculum, a curriculum focused on depth:

While Hirsch does not see the extensive curriculum as sufficient for mature literacy, he does see it as constraining what must be taught in order to teach literacy in its more advanced forms:

In essence, then, significant cultural facts and associations form the essential building blocks for mature literacy. But in order for cultural facts and associations to play this central role, there must be a theory of mature literacy within which they can be shown to play it. What is it about literacy in its mature stages that requires the teaching of Shakespeare and not of Neil Simon? Hirsch's extensive curriculum makes sense only as input to the intensive curriculum and to a theory of mature literacy.

On this vital connection, Hirsch is vague. At least, one would expect some aspects of his extensive curriculum to adumbrate the principles of mature literacy with which students must eventually grapple. Yet Hirsch offers not a whisper of information on how the one curriculum speaks to the other—how fact learning speaks to more reflective learning.

My alternative theory is designed to make this link explicit. Taking as its ideal the reader or writer “contributing” cultural knowledge, it embodies many of Hirsch's ideals for culturally shared knowledge but extends them and significantly alters their focus. Sharing, within this alternative, remains a goal: writers surely can't be expected to contribute to a culture that they don't share. But contributing now becomes a parallel aim: writers can't be expected to share a culture to which they can't contribute. Without sharing, as Hirsch notes, we have fragmentation rather than freedom. But unless we hope to contribute to what we share, sharing is an authoritarian exercise rather than a legitimate tool of democracy.

I shall refer to this alternative as the “contributing” theory of cultural literacy in oposition to Hirsch's theory of “sharing.” The content focus of a contributing theory is—not the list, reference, or text—but the issue. Literate readers and writers may share a cultural background, but the importance of that sharing is that it provides a vehicle for contributing to common issues. Within a contributing theory, “teaching content” finally means teaching issues. The teaching of issues can, of course, work its way into the teaching of specific texts that themselves try to contribute to these issues.

Many of our most prized texts (fiction and nonfiction) are valued simply because they have made enormous contributions to our understanding of specific issues. From the perspective of a contributing theory of literacy, however, a list, reference, or text is judged valuable as “cultural content” entirely by its perceived value to the cultural issue (or issues) to which it aims to contribute. The common coin of literacy is not cultural facts and associations but, rather cultural conversations. Students achieve membership by becoming aware that a culture is composed of ongoing conversations, many of which are essential to its continuing freedom and survival.

Before students can function as contributors in their own right, they must learn to identify some of these conversations, on either traditional or nontraditional interpretations of culture. On more traditional interpretations, issues of democracy, freedom, paternalism, censorship, animal rights, and war and peace would seem classic places to start. On nontraditional interpretations, issues of gender, child rearing, evolution, capitalism, and bilingualism are also probably ripe. Long before students are ready to tackle the sources that have most influenced them, they should know that such issues, such cultural conversations, exist.

Consistent with Hirsch's curriculum, a high school or college sequence based on a contributing theory of literacy would also operate with extensive and intensive curricula. But unlike Hirsch's model, the extensive curriculum would develop in parallel with the intensive. Students would take “content” courses in tandem with “skills” courses. It wouldn't be so much a matter of “here is the cultural background you need to learn, and someday you'll know what for.” The extensive curriculum would cover the background students need to comprehend various cultural conversations. The intensive curriculum would give them the practice they need to act on these conversations as readers and writers—practice in summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing and in contributing itself.

The extensive-intensive curricula would be sequenced according to the criterion of parallel difficulty. In the early years of schooling, teachers would have rather modest expectations about students' depth of comprehension as well as about the sophistication with which students are able to act on what they understand. In later years, these expectations would grow, in parallel.

The intensive curriculum would thus function as the intellectual engine. The extensive curriculum would function as the data source to fuel the engine and to increase its power and range. Hirsch lectures us on the importance of data sources for literacy but remains entirely vague on the engine that still must power these sources for acts of literacy to be engaged.

The movement from early to later schooling would involve a shift from the “personal” to the more “public” sides of issues. Culturally valuable issues are issues that people can feel, even the young. Take, for example, a curriculum organized around the issue of paternalism. Paternalism concerns the rights of government or other persons or professionals to interfere in the lives of others “for their own good” but against their will. The entire educational system (in loco parentis) raises qustions about the appropriateness of paternalism. So do seatbelt laws. So also the well-meaning but deceptive practices of parents toward their children, doctors toward their patients, one well-meaning but intrusive friend toward another. Students are familiar with these contexts, many from firsthand experience. They needn't go to a law library to enumerate cases.

The early forms of the intensive curriculum rely disproportionately on the personalized dimension of issues. Because the issue has been personalized, students can rehearse, albeit at an elementary level, skills of mature literacy (summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, contributing) before they have the knowledge base to gain true cultural recognition for their interpretations and to make true cultural contributions with them. Students get a sense of what it means to contribute cultural knowledge, but within a controlled universe of texts that makes contributing less intimidating. They learn that the leap from “chiming in” at the dinner table is not much different from “chiming in” on two editorials by producing a third. In addition, students can analyze hypothetical cases. A friend tells on another friend “for her own good.” Was the paternalism justified? Drawing from personal or from novelized experience, students can learn to contribute to these questions.

At some point, of course, mature reflection requires a mature content to drive it. And thus, in later manifestations, the curriculum will draw increasingly on sophisticated data from the “public,” “scholarly,” “cultural,” or “technical” sides of issues. For example, Plato, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mill, Dostoevsky, and H. L. Hart all struggled with the issue of paternalism and found themselves sufficiently dissatisfied with contemporary cultural conversations to see the need to “chime in” and advance it. The extensive curriculum would give advanced students the background to comprehend these authors. The intensive curriculum would furnish them with the tools to represent these authors as part of a cultural conversation, a conversation providing them with a set of cultural givens. Students would then learn how to explore the givens in order to go beyond them, in order to come up with something new to say.

Both early and later schooling teach students not only content but ways of contributing new ideas to it. What changes is our expectations about the sophistication that students bring to the task.

I am putting much stock in the notion of learning to contribute new ideas, or newness , as the underlying basis for a theory of cultural literacy bridging developing and mature forms of literacy. The notion of newness, however, remains slippery. Just what do I mean by it? I define newness as the mechanism by which “interesting,” “not fully expected,” or “surprising” knowledge is discovered, constructed, and foregrounded against a background of old, given, or received knowledge. While Hirsch is right in describing our cultural background as a historical reality and cultural inheritance, he overlooks the important fact that it is also an authorial construct.

Every author must in part passively accept, must in part actively design, what is “conventional,” “traditional,” or “received” in order to direct readers beyond it. Newness thus spans two complementary notions: (1) accounting for one's cultural givens and (2) constructing the givens in a way that allows one to go beyond them. A contributing theory emphasizes both faces of newness. Hirsch's theory only mentions the first face and offers no pathway from the first to the second—the very pathway, I submit, needed to bridge developing and mature forms of literacy.

A theory of contributing thus inserts newness at the center, where Hirsch has placed shared cultural knowledge. One wonders, though, about the larger political questions involving newness. Why should one think it a less authoritarian criterion than shared knowledge? If a panel of experts must be summoned to decide what constitutes shared knowledge, why needn't they also be summoned to decide what counts as new?

The truth be told, experts do make the decisions about newness. Journals configure editorial boards on the assumption that the boundaries between the given and the new can be reliably and objectively judged by experts. And teachers, another kind of expert, must decide what newness means in its qualified forms (e.g., against the background of what has been given in the classroom for students to move beyond). But while in both cases experts must determine the boundaries between the given and the new, the final test, I want to suggest, is not whether or how or even that they can agree precisely on these boundaries. The final test, rather, depends on whether students can learn to read and write with some (properly constrained) notion of newness as an operating principle.

Newness may seem like a horribly abstract and intimidating concept for students, far less practicable than learning lists. In point of fact, learning lists is a far less practicable notion without some implicit and properly constrained notion of newness to nourish it. Within a contributing theory of literacy, culturally shared knowledge is important because it provides a vehicle for exerting personal authority, for allowing a student to talk back to his or her culture by exploring beyond the culture's givens. Lacking a notion of newness, Hirsch's theory turns out to be far less workable for students than it would first seem.

To make my case, I turn once again to Pattison, who has described two common educational situations that threaten to stop Hirsch's practical prograrn dead in its tracks. Pattison refers to these situations by endearing names: the Shakespeare Paradox and the Finn Syndrome. Whatever we call them, they can be shown to arise because Hirsch has exaggerated the importance of cultural sharing and has failed to develop the instrumental relation between shared knowledge and the human aspiration to move beyond the given to say something new.

The Shakespeare Paradox begins with the observation that shared references that once promoted efficient communication may lose their utility after generations of negligible use. In a society where everyone knows Julius Caesar; for example, the passage “There is a tide” communicates without elaboration. But once the play is no longer read, the passage is no longer rehearsed and its capacity to support efficient communication diminishes. The paradox rears its head when we decide nonetheless to revive Shakespeare n order to correct these and other communicative inefficiencies. In the name of expedience, we have legitimized a rather inexpedient and roundabout practice.

The Finn Syndrome reflects Huck Finn's attitude that one shouldn't “take stock in dead people.” Hirsch suggests that students will learn any fact they are taught. Pattison, citing the Finn Syndrome as his authority, argues that students are much more selective and learn only what they care to learn. The disposition to learn redounds on the disposition to want to learn. Are students ignorant about World War II because they've never had a unit on it—or, as the Finn Syndrome suggests, because they've never been presented with enough personally involving and meaningful experiences to want to confront their ignorance and seek to reduce it?

A theory of cultural literacy as sharing can't easily avoid the Shakespeare Paradox and the Finn Syndrome. Other than providing a vague sense of cultural “belonging,” it leaves undefined the students' personal stake in the learning process. In contrast to a theory of cultural literacy as sharing, a contributing theory makes this incentive clear and self-sustaining: to follow the directions of others through an involving issue in order to establish the authority to move beyond these givens to one's own path.

Students should not be forced to learn an isolated phrase or locution or fact if it remains just that—isolated in time and space. Shared knowledge is powerful because of what it enables (i.e., exploring what remains unshared). Knowledge that was once shared (but is no longer) loses this enabling power and therefore is less interesting to a theory of literacy as contributing. Implicit within a contributing theory, then, are mechanisms for attenuating the effects of the Shakespeare Paradox.

Alleviating the Finn Syndrome requires additional measures. Though issues, like facts, are historical entities, they, unlike facts, are mortal. Issues spring forth, but we actively plan for them to be put to rest and hence for their importance to us to diminish. The Finn Syndrome is relived by insisting that content should be taught when it can efficiently inform issues that remain present and alive for students. A “live” issue need not mean “immediate relevance” in the sixties sense. It's much easier to convince a student that a nineteenth-century issue lives on than that a nineteenth-century fact is relevant. Once students see the connections between content and “live issues,” they can begin to appreciate the subtle efficiencies and hidden relevancies of sources that they may earlier have dismissed as “remote.”

Why learn a content if it can't help you get where you want to go? or can't tell you where you should be going? Content (for the reader or writer) becomes interesting when it offers, or provides the tools for understanding, a useful set of directions for working through an issue, directions that are accountable to one's cultural givens and yet point the way, not incidentally, to a true advance beyond the givens. In stark contrast, the conceptual coin of a sharing theory, be it a notion like “conventional,” “shared,” or “traditional” knowledge, offers no mechanism for explaining how individuals within a culture can legitimately transfer the dividends accrued from a shared content to their personal accounts. The concept of newness, I suggest, not only satisfies as a bridge between developing and mature forms of literacy. It also embodies the right political baggage (of individual autonomy, growth, and development) by insisting that we help students cross that bridge.

I have tried to sketch some reasons for believing that a theory of cultural literacy based on contributing new knowledge is conceptually richer, less vague, and less authoritarian than a comparable theory based on “shared knowledge.” I've saved the most difficult—and gray—question for last: Is it as practical? Can it be democratic in its implementation? Many concede that Hirsch's plan is simple but question whether his list fairly represents cultural knowledge. I want to make two concluding points: (1) the “fairness” of a curriculum (how it was derived) has nothing to do with its worth, (2) the practicality of a curriculum is measured by more than the simplicity of its implementation.

Suppose we agree that the issue of paternalism is an important cultural conversation. Planning our intensive curriculum, we try to decide on sources that contribute to the issue, sources that can teach students to read and write for newness in its qualified senses. Planning our extensive curriculum, we focus on the background (linguistic, cultural, historical) that we believe students require to make their way intelligently through these and increasingly difficult sources.

How do we arrive at these curricular agreements? I harbor no illusions that we can make them democratically or do better than Hirsch does. Although they certainly can't be made by students, they aren't arbitrary. Indeed, once we have decided on our intensive curriculum and its level of difficulty, we can probably use empirical data to establish what needs to go into the accompanying extensive curriculum.

Suppose that from student readings of the literature on paternalism, we find that sophistication is lacking because, among other problems, students do not understand the complex meanings of the word autonomy , the rich history of consent theory, or the cultural influence and implications of John Stuart Mill's harm principle as discussed in On Liberty. Such discoveries yield substantive reasons for including this lexical, historical, and cultural information in an extensive curriculum.

This procedure still does not speak to the arrangements we make to decide on our overall curriculum, on our issues and contents. Let us say, for want of a better alternative, that we do it Hirsch's way. We circulate lists and seek a consensus. We won't get a perfect consensus. We'll do no better than Hirsch and probably no worse. We might clamor that it's easier to reach agreement on important issues than on important facts. But, in the end, there seems little gain in trying to argue about curricula from a consensus model.

Teachers usually invest in a curriculum years after it has proved its worth, not years before. In this regard, curricula are more properly viewed as scientific theories than as tensely negotiated political settlements. Like scientific theories, social enclaves should have a hand more in confirming a curriculum than in developing its original contents. Who cares if a curriculum is invented by committee or by a trio at the University of Virginia? What's important about a curriculum is that it avows worthy goals, provides a reasonable plan for meeting them, and allows evaluation and revision.

In the final analysis, a curriculum is “open” and “democratic” to the extent we can hold the decision makers accountable. Are they willing to defend the goals they seek to achieve through it? Are they willing to make adjustments when things don't go according to plan? An authoritarian suspicion already clouds Hirsch's list, not so much because he has a list (many educators have lists), but because some see him as defending it with a zeal and a lack of humor that they equate, in ways not always fair, with inflexibility.

My own brief against Hirsch places the authoritarian suspicion deeper, as an outcome of his taking too narrow a view of cultural literacy. He doesn't seem able to revise his curriculum openly or extensively and remain consistent with his basic beliefs. Imagine that students have a hard time learning Hirsch's lists or using them profitably in their own reading. Hirsch must then appeal to a deeper motivation to explain how the problem arose and how it can be corrected. He can't change the details of the list but must defend more fundamental assumptions of his program.

And yet, the Shakespeare Paradox and the Finn Syndrome illustrate two deep-rooted problems that seem to defy correction within his framework. These situations arise just when learning under the incentive of “cultural sharing” conflicts with and gets priority over learning under the incentive of relevant and authoritative communication. Hirsch's mistake is not to have gone far enough to develop the interplay between cultural sharing and personal authority.

Students lack cultural knowledge all right, but is this because they haven't been taught what is shared? or because they haven't been taught how cultural sharing can add to their personal power and authority as readers and writers? On the first diagnosis, Hirsch's diagnosis, what students lack is shared information. On the second diagnosis, the one I prefer, students lack precisely what Hirsch fails to offer them—a theory of cultural literacy as contributing. They lack a vision of themselves as empowered to follow and, eventually, to lead our most important cultural conversations.

Once students nourish this vision of themselves, they also have the incentive to fill in whatever information they need to realize it. Their vision of literacy makes the information they learn valuable, makes the content rewarding. Holding an appropriate vision of literacy is crucial for understanding how the details fit together. Hirsch has many of the details right. But in missing an appropriate theory to organize the details, he has missed a great deal—and so bequeaths us a list (a practicum) in lieu of a sound practical theory.

Hirsch must be given credit for showing us (once again) that literacy is a cultural phenomenon, that our literacy is, in fact, our cultural literacy. But we need not—and should not—accept Hirsch's particular interpretation of cultural literacy, which overlooks the practices of literacy most prized in a free society and thus misdescribes, fundamentally, the role that our cultural knowledge must play in introducing our students to these practices.

Works Cited

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton, 1987.

Pattison, Robert. “On the Finn Syndrome and the Shakespeare Paradox.” Rev. of Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and The Closing of the American Mind , by Allan Bloom. Nation 30 May 1987: 710+.

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Cultural Literacy: A Critique of Hirsch and an Alternative Theory

DAVID S. KAUFER

Works Cited

ADE Bulletin 094 (Winter 1989): 23-28