NEWSWEEK: What You Need to Know Now

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What You Need to Know Now

By Jon Meacham
Newsweek

July 2-9, 2007 issue - Twenty summers ago, in 1987, as the shadows fell on the Reagan years, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, E. D. Hirsch, published a surprise best seller: "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know." (It was No. 2 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction list in June 1987.) Hirsch's basic argument: that every reader needs to be conversant with certain terms and facts in order to make sense of what is written and discussed in the public sphere.

The book was not even in stores before it provoked a debate over diversity and multiculturalism. A clever publicist from Houghton Mifflin, the book's publisher, had arranged for Hirsch to appear at a gathering of education writers in San Francisco, where Hirsch laid out his case, including his 63-page list of terms ranging from "abolitionism" to "Zurich."

A reporter from the Associated Press asked Hirsch, "Why isn't 'Cinco de Mayo' on the list?" Hirsch apologized and admitted he did not know what the phrase meant. (It is the Spanish designation for a holiday commemorating a Mexican military victory over the French on May 5, 1862.) The AP writer filed his piece, which flashed around the nation. By the time Hirsch returned to his hotel room, he recalls, there was a message from a TV station in Texas asking whether he was worried about all the things that were not on the list. "I knew then the storm was coming," Hirsch recalls.

He was right about that. Hirsch was attacked for the limitations of his list, and for the implication that the "culture" about which we were supposed to be literate was a narrowly defined one that excluded the experiences of women, minorities and immigrants. Lists, or attempts to define a literary or cultural canon, make many people understandably uncomfortable.

Today the term "cultural literacy" evokes long-ago culture wars. Though the origin of Hirsch's interest in the topic was how to give disadvantaged students some core knowledge to enable them to grasp allusions the broader culture takes for granted (you cannot understand the question of whether Iraq is "another Vietnam" if you do not know what "Vietnam" means), the book quickly came to stand for a kind of cultural elitism. (The No. 1 best seller in that distant June was Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," an Ur-text for conservatives battling what they saw as the excesses of liberal political correctness.)

One lesson of the debate is that there cannot be a single, definitive list of what Americans should know; the nation is too fluid, too diverse, the world too vast and complex. The value of debating what Americans should know about certain subjects has, however, moved well beyond Hirsch. Foundations and authors now promote financial literacy, geographic literacy, environmental literacy and media literacy; Stephen Prothero's "Religious Literacy" was a best seller earlier this year.

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of the nasty legacies of imperialism and despots, and we would choose not to forget them, maybe we could live in mutual respect and peace.

he fed off of it instead of trying to not make the same mistakes. But I get your drift.