Cultural Literacy Analysis

In the essay “Cultural Literacy,” E.D. Hirsh argues that raising our literacy levels cannot solely depend on researching new and varies “teaching techniques”, but by implementing “cultural literacy” into our school curricula. In fact, he suggests that educational institutions steer away from teaching “cultural literacy” in fear of “imposing cultures and ideologies” which is a factor in the decline of literacy. He references a couple of experiments which helped him realized that students weren’t literate in cultural aspects or “cultural literacy”. Hirsh claims by administering these cultural concepts into the classroom, literacy will increase. Hirsh noticed that the assumptions that were made from “educational formalism” were incorrect (110). He saw the flaw in the claim when he conducted an experiment of people’s evaluation skills after using different teaching techniques. He had a group of University students evaluate two different papers: one was on “friendship” and another was on “Grant and Lee”. Hirsh found that people could tell the difference between a good piece of writing and a bad one for the friendship paper; however, the results of whether or not the people
Hirsh addresses the current curriculum guide for the study of English and points out that there is no “set reading list” that teachers can use as a guide (106). The curriculum follows the idea of “the doctrine of formalism that states that any suitable materials of instruction can be used to teach the skills of reading and writing (106).” He states that the educational system today is “transfixed by pluralism and formalism (113)” when the focus needs to be on “unity and diversity (106).” The lack of a “set” of commonly agreed upon works, which focuses on cultural aspects of society, directly affects students’