Cultural Literacy

"ED Hirsch is a literature professor who has become best known for his thoughts about cultural literacy and what he means by that is the things we need to know to be educated people. We’re now getting a bit better at teaching reading in this country. Reading test scores are inching up but then they go flat at third or fourth grade. We’re teaching kids to read but we’re not giving them enough background to understand what they’re sounding out. A student who sees the word Everglades may be able to divide up that compound word into ever and glades but if they don’t know about the swamps in Florida no amount of sounding out will enable them to understand its meaning. They could read the word, but they couldn’t comprehend it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The rebellion against rote learning went too far and the pendulum has swung too far towards what promoters call “21st-century learning”, which champions “ critical thinking ” over content. The idea is we really don’t need to know content, we just need to know how to move content around, how to research on the web and store content in the right folder. I’ve realised that Hirsch is right: Content does matter. Higher order thinking must be grounded in content. A good school has a rich content. Absolutely. Cultural literacy is critical to the health of our democracy. ED Hirsch reminds us that we shouldn’t let schools teach our children to be mere accountants of information. He reminds us it is as important to know Greek mythology as PowerPoint. Content continues to matter, a lot."