The Theory Behind the Dictionary: Cultural Literacy and Education. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002

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The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.

The Theory Behind the Dictionary: Cultural Literacy and Education

The conceptions that underlie this dictionary are outlined in my book Cultural Literacy, published in 1987. But in fact, the dictionary project was begun before I thought of writing a separate book, and the book itself was first conceived merely as a technical explanation of the ideas that led us to undertake the dictionary. The scope of the book outgrew that aim, but no one even considered the possibility that the book would become a best-seller or that it would be read outside the field of education. Although it did become a best-seller and its ideas have been widely discussed, many users of this dictionary may not be familiar with the concept of cultural literacy. So here, in brief compass, is why this project was undertaken, and why we hope it will help improve American public education and public discourse.

One good way of explaining the cultural literacy project might well be to list the points of strong agreement that have appeared in reviews of the book and in the hundreds of letters I have received from teachers and nonteachers alike. All these reviews and letters endorse the proposition that achieving high universal literacy ought to be a primary focus of educational reform in this country. They all accept the evidence that our national literacy has been declining since 1965, not only among disadvantaged children but also among our top students. They agree that the decline has occurred at a time when truly functional literacy is becoming ever more important to our economic well-being. And they have usually stressed the idea that providing everyone with a high level of literacy is important in holding together the social fabric of the nation.

The novelty that my book introduced into this discussion is its argument that true literacy depends on a knowledge of the specific information that is taken for granted in our public discourse. My emphasis on background information makes my book an attack on all formal and technical approaches to teaching language arts. Reading and writing are not simply acts of decoding and encoding but rather acts of communication. The literal words we speak and read and write are just the tip of the iceberg in communication. An active understanding of the written word requires far more than the ability to call out words from a page or the possession of basic vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and inferencing techniques. We have learned that successful reading also requires a knowledge of shared, taken-for-granted information that is not set down on the page.

To grasp the practical importance of that point for our entire educational system, we need to ask a fundamental question. Why is high national literacy the key to educational progress in all domains of learning, even in mathematics and natural sciences? We have long known that there is a high correlation between students’ reading ability and their ability to learn new materials in diverse fields. That sounds vaguely reasonable, even obvious, buy why exactly should it be the case? Let’s try to understand the not-so-obvious reason for the high correlation between reading ability and learning ability.

The true measure of reading ability is the ease and accuracy with which a person can understand diverse kinds of writing. All standardized tests of reading ability include samples from several different subject matters. Buy why isn’t one long sample just as effective a test as several short ones? Well, if reading ability were a purely generalizable skill, one long sample would be an adequate diagnostic test. But in fact, reading ability is not a generalizable skill. If a young boy knows a lot about snakes but very little about lakes, he will make a good score on a passage about snakes, but a less good score on a passage about lakes. So to get a fairly accurate picture of his overall reading ability, we have to sample how he does on a variety of subjects.

But notice that this variability in a person’s performance shows us something of utmost importance about reading ability. To have a good general reading ability, you need to know about a lot of things. If you know about lakes and snakes, and rakes and cakes, you will have higher reading ability than if you just know about snakes. Aha! you might say, that simply means you will read better if you have a broad vocabulary. That is true. But remember what it means to have a broad vocabulary. Knowing a lot of words means knowing a lot of things. Words refer to things. Language arts are also knowledge arts.

We have now taken a first step in understanding the correlation between reading ability and learning ability. We have established that high reading ability is a multiplex skill that requires knowledge in a wide range of subjects. It turns out that the same is true of learning ability. A basic axiom of learning is that the easiest way to learn something new is to associate it with something we already know. Much of the art of teaching is the art of associating what kids need to learn with what they already know. The process of learning often works as metaphor does, yoking old ideas together to make something new. In the nineteenth century, when people wanted to describe the new transportation technology that went chug-chug-chug, they called the engine an “iron horse” and the rail system “track way” (if they were Dutch) or “rail way” (if they were English) or “iron way” (if they were French, German, or Italian) or “narrow iron lane” (if they were Greek). All of these metaphors successfully conveyed a new concept by combining old concepts.

As a consequence of the fact that we learn most easily when we attach the new to the old, people who already know a lot tend to learn new things faster and more easily than people who do not know very much. Mainly this is because knowledgeable people will have less to learn; they already know many of the key elements in the new concept. In learning about a railroad, for instance, they possess whole realms of relevant knowledge that make it unnecessary to explain a lot of subordinate facts about how wheels work, what the nature of iron is, what steam engines do, and so on.

It should now be clear why reading ability and learning ability are so closely allied. They both depend on a diversity of prior knowledge. You can easily read a range of new texts if you already know a lot; so too you can easily learn a broad range of new knowledge if you already know a lot. It should not surprise us, therefore, that back in the 1950s the College Board found out that the best predictor of how well students would perform in school was their performance on a general knowledge test. “Reading, writing, and arithmetic” and the general ability to learn new things all show a high correlation with broad background knowledge.

I must ask your indulgence to take another step along the path I am leading you. Reading and learning ability depend on something more definite than broad, unspecified knowledge. To a significant degree, learning and reading depend on specific broad knowledge. The reason for this goes back to my earlier point that reading is not just a technical skill but also an act of communication. When somebody is reading with understanding, communication is taking place between writer and reader. Conversely, if communication isn’t taking place, the reader isn’t accurately understanding what he or she is reading. Successful communication depends on understanding both the text’s literal meanings and its implied meanings. These all-important implied meanings can only be constructed out of specific knowledge shared between writer and reader. Let me give a very brief example of why this is so. Here are the beginning words of a school textbook on chemistry:

You are beginning your study of chemistry at a time when growing numbers of people are concerned about the declining quality of life. Chemistry can help you gain a deeper and more satisfying understanding of your environment than you have now. If you are curious and wish to know more about natural processes, minerals of the earth, water and solutions, and gases of the atmosphere, the activities in chemistry beckon to you.

That’s it. As a child, I’m supposed to know before reading the passage that chemistry has to do with minerals, water, and solutions, that numbers of people are concerned about the quality of life, that quality of life has something to do with water and solutions. Understanding that passage will be easy if I already know what “chemistry,” “solution,” and “declining quality of life” are supposed to signify.

But just consider the words of that last phrase one by one, “declining quality of life.” They presuppose a whole realm of background knowledge that has no existence in the words themselves. To understand the phrase quickly and accurately, I need more than a knowledge of the individual words or possession of general inferencing skills. I need to know the writer’s taken-for-granted information—in this case, the widespread discussion in our culture about the pollution of rivers, atmosphere, and so on. Neither the word nor the concept of pollution is mentioned in the passage. But to understand the paragraph, I not only need to know that rivers and air are being polluted, I also need to know the unspoken convention that complaints about pollution are sometimes couched in the phrase “declining quality of life.” If I don’t share that background knowledge with the writer, I can’t quickly understand the passage. Even someone with a good command of English and technical reading skills who happened not to know that particular background information would be baffled for a long time by the juxtaposition of quality of life with a reference to aqueous solutions.

Reading ability, then, depends not only on broad knowledge but also on shared knowledge. Communication between writer and reader always depends on implications that remain unsaid, and that must be shared by writer and reader if the communication is to proceed effectively. Since successful learning from reading depends on the effectiveness of the communicative transaction, I am led to the conclusion that both learning and reading are powerfully affected by the degree to which background knowledge is shared between writer and reader, and between teacher and student. To learn well, I need to know a lot, but I also need to know the specific things that enable me to read between the lines.

Therefore, learning depends on communication, and effective communication depends on shared background knowledge. The optimal way to fulfill this requirement of communication is simply to insure that readers and writers, students and teachers do in fact share a broad range of specific knowledge. This makes good communication possible, which in turn makes effective learning possible, and also enables a society to work. In short, we have come round to the point of my book. An important key to solving the twin problems of learning and literacy is to attain the broadly shared background knowledge I have called “cultural literacy.” My book argues that the content of this literate background knowledge is not a mystery, and that it can be taught systematically to all our students. The book further claims that if we do impart this content, we can achieve the universal literacy that is a necessary foundation for further educational, economic, and social improvements. No active reading researcher—that is to say, no one who is thoroughly conversant with the empirical data in cognitive research—has challenged this analysis.

We know from the history of Europe that national schools can achieve high literacy for everyone in a multicultural population. France did so with a population that, up to the eighteenth century, spoke at least four different languages. The French school system turned illiterate “peasants into Frenchmen,” to use Eugen Weber’s phrase, and it was the school system, not the peasant home, that accomplished this miracle. Viewed in a long historical perspective, it has been the school, not the home, that has been the decisive factor in achieving mass literacy. Literate national language and culture are what Ernest Gellner aptly calls school-transmitted cultures. He observes that the chief makers of the modern nation have been schoolteachers. They helped create the modern nation-state, and they alone can perpetuate it and make it thrive. When the schools of a nation fail adequately to transmit the literate national language and culture, the unity and effectiveness of the nation will necessarily decline.

While avoiding the temptation to cast blame for our recent decline in literacy, we do need to understand and correct it. One important cause of the decline has been the use of “skills-oriented,” “relevant” materials in elementary and secondary grades. The consequent disappearance from the early curriculum of literate culture (that is, traditional history, myth, and literature) has been a mistake of monumental proportions. Modern basal readers constantly update the content that young children are taught, under the theory that modern materials will be of greater interest to them than older stories and myths, as though reading, writing, and oral communication were formal skills that could be perfected independently of specific literate content. Unfortunately, as we have seen, that theory is empirically wrong, and operating upon it has had disastrous consequences for national literacy. Research on expert performance shows a high correlation between skill and specific knowledge, and this correlation holds from the beginning stages up to the very top levels of performance.

Publishers and schools need to direct their energies to enhancing the effectiveness with which core literate content is presented. They should not try to overhaul the entire content of literate culture, which cannot successfully be done in any case. Professional linguists have often remarked on the inherent conservatism of literacy. Some of its elements do not change at all. Spelling, for example, is extraordinarily conservative, because so many people have learned the traditional forms, and so many books have recorded them, that successful spelling reform would require orthographical thought-police. This linguistic inertia induced by print and mass education also extends to other contents of literate culture.

But the conservatism of literate culture is far from total. New elements are constantly coming in, and old ones falling out of use. Americans have successfully pressed for cultural reforms, including greater representation of women, minorities, and non-Western cultures. In addition, literate culture must keep up with historical and technical change. Yet the materials of literate culture that are recent introductions constitute about a fifth of its total. The disputed territory of literate culture is much smaller still—about 4 percent. Thus, 96 percent of literate culture is undisputed territory, and, most striking of all, 80 percent of literate culture has been in use for more than a hundred years!

Such cultural conservatism is fortunate and useful for the purposes of national communication. It enables grandparents to communicate with grandchildren, southerners with midwesterners, whites with blacks, Asians with Latinos, and Republicans with Democrats—no matter where they were educated. If each local school system imparts the traditional reference points of literate culture, then everybody is able to communicate with strangers. That is a good definition of literacy: the ability to communicate effectively with strangers. We help people in the underclass rise economically by teaching them how to communicate effectively beyond a narrow social sphere, and that can only be accomplished by teaching them shared, traditional literate culture. Thus the inherent conservatism of literacy leads to an unavoidable paradox: the social goals of liberalism require educational conservatism. We only make social and economic progress by teaching everyone to read and communicate, which means teaching myths and facts that are predominantly traditional.

Those who evade this inherent conservatism of literacy in the name of multicultural antielitism are in effect elitists of an extreme sort. Traditionally educated themselves, and highly literate, these self-appointed protectors of minority cultures have advised schools to pursue a course that has condemned minorities to illiteracy. The disadvantaged students for whom antielitist solicitude is expressed are the very ones who suffer when we fail to introduce traditional literate culture into the earliest grades. Ideological partisanship on the subject of national literacy is more empirical than ideological. The overarching ideological decision has already been made in the commitment to universal literacy. What follows from that commitment is determined more by reality than ideology.

The real test of any educational idea is its usefulness. We hope this dictionary will be a useful tool. We also hope and expect that no one will be willing to stop with cultural literacy as a final educational aim. Cultural literacy is a necessary but not sufficient attainment of an educated person. Cultural literacy is shallow; true education is deep. But our analysis of reading and learning suggests the paradox that broad, shallow knowledge is the best route to deep knowledge. Because broad knowledge enables us to read and learn effectively, it is the best guarantee that we will continue to read, and learn, and deepen our knowledge. True literacy has always opened doors—not just to deep knowledge and economic success, but also to other people and other cultures.

—E. D. HIRSCH, JR.

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS · INDEX · GUIDE · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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