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In Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, author E. D. Hirsch forces the reader to address one simple question; Why do we educate children? Depending on how sympathetic you are to Hirsch upon finishing the book, you may conclude that we educate children so that they are capable of functioning, that is living, working and communicating, in an everchanging society. This definition is a reasonable one but issues arise when looking for the most effective way to implement education.

Hirsch states that a functioning society requires that citizens share a common non-specialist knowledge of their culture when participating in public discourse. Citizens able to engage in this discourse are defined as the culturally literate. A culturally literate Englishman, for example, knows the intended meanings of a catch 22 situation, a Scrooge, flying too close to the sun, fighting them on the beaches or having the heart and stomach of a king without having necessarily read Heller or Dickens, knowing Greek mythology or being fully aware of the setting of our most famous speeches. Hirsch believes that being culturally literate has become the great divider simply because where education has failed to teach this knowledge, the middle classes have been able to impart it to their children at home.

Hirsch is keen that the reader reflect on the case of Cicero who used Latin phrases and terms common to culturally literate Romans to explain complex Greek science and philosophy. Cicero used the shared language to deliver new concepts and skills. Consider the amount of specialist and non-specialist skills that modern society requires of its workforce – it is quickly changing, and the education system cannot teach every skill required. Now consider how little the written English language has changed since it was made uniform; non-specialists can still read the language of the American Declaration of Independence regardless of the changes to society over 200 years. Therefore, it is plausible to suggest that learning new skills is secondary in importance to being culturally literate, but education hasn’t always reflected this. For Hirsch the solutions lie in a knowledge-based curriculum where facts are imparted through rote learning.

The evidence used in the book is compelling and one could certainly argue that books for primary aged children that help decode but deliver no cultural content only do half the job that is required of them. A knowledge-based curriculum explicitly tells students what they need to learn and what they need to do to succeed. It seems unusual to think that university students are fed a diet of instructivism from the lecture hall but have grown up with discovery-based learning ideas.

The theory is not without issues. Toward the end of the book we see a criticism of Bloom’s Taxonomy as Hirsch believes that knowledge should be at the top of the taxonomy. This seems problematic as there is a significant difference between knowing that pulleys enable us to lift greater weights and using them to build the pyramids. A strawman perhaps, but those great revelations of man which were surely made standing on the shoulders of giants were discovered through synthesis of previously learned knowledge and to completely remove exploration and synthesis from our schools may well send the pendulum too far the other way.