Cultural literacy and the schools

(From "Cultural Literacy" by E.D. Hirsch)

School is the traditional place for acculturating children into our national life. Family, church, and other institutions play an important role, but school is the only institution that is susceptible to public policy control. In the modern age, the role assigned to our schools is to prepare our children for the broader activities of society and to train them in the literate public culture. Our schools have played this role less well than they should, chiefly because they have followed faulty educational ideas. The practical importance of ideas in human affairs, while not a recent revelation, is one that is too easily forgotten.

The decline of American literacy and the fragmentation of the American school curriculum have been chiefly caused by the ever growing dominance of romantic formalism in educational theory during the past half century. We have too readily blamed shortcomings of American education on social changes (the disorientation of the American family or the impact of television) or incompetent teachers or structural flaws in our school systems. But the chief blame should fall on faulty theories promulgated in our schools of education and accepted by educational policy-makers.

Why have we failed to give our children the information they lack? Chiefly because of educational formalism, which encourages us to ignore the fact that identifying and imparting the information a child is missing is most important in the earliest grades, when the task is most manageable. At age six, when a child must acquire knowledge critical for continuing development, the total quantity of missing information is not huge. The technical reading skills of disadvantaged children at age six are still on a par with those of children from literate families. Supplying missing knowledge to children early is of tremendous importance for enhancing their motivation and intellectual self-confidence, not to mention their subsequent ability to learn new materials. Yet schools will never systematically impart missing background information as long as they continue to accept the formalistic principle that specific information is irrelevant to "language arts skills."

Education formalism holds that reading and writing are like baseball and skating; formalism conceives of literacy as a set of techniques that can be developed by proper coaching and practice.

The trouble is that reading for meaning is a different sort of game entirely. Every text, even the most elementary, implies information that it takes for granted and doesn't explain. Knowing such information is the decisive skill of reading.

Assignments:

1. Translate the text using a dictionary.

2. Say whether you agree with the reasons for the decline of literacy the author gives.