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Welcome to the Cultural Literacy web site. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., a professor of English at the University of Virginia, postulated that schools’ should be educating children on mastering the American culture. Cultural literacy was Hirsch’s proposition that a literate democracy required a certain amount of shared knowledge. He stated that there was a decline of shared knowledge that could be seen by the lack of communication skills young people possessed, and by their inability to recall basic historical facts or to communicate across generations. Hirsch believes that children need background information early to make sense of significant reading material. There is a need to start literacy instruction as early as possible. Disadvantaged children rarely have access to reading materials outside the school. Therefore, to end illiteracy, educators need to convey literate knowledge in the early grades (Hirsch, 1987). High literacy requires knowledge of a wide variety of subjects. Reading and learning skills are dependent on more than broad background knowledge. They rely on specific shared knowledge, because reading is not only a technical skill but also an act of communication. To read with understanding is to grasp both the text's literal meaning and its implied meaning, which is when the reader and writer share precisely relevant background knowledge (Hirsch, 1998). The fact that specific knowledge is required for reading, learning, and thinking implies that broad knowledge leads to deeper understanding. It enables students to read and learn quickly, easily, and with pleasure, therefore, they will read, learn, and deepen their knowledge. It isn't enough to learn habits and techniques. It is important and necessary to learn certain background information that enables one to have intellectual skills within a culture (Hirsch, 1998). The Core Knowledge curriculum, developed by E.D. Hirsch of the University of Virginia, works on the simple principle that knowledge is powerful. Hirsch contends that a person can not function well in a society if he does not know the culture of that environment. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation has developed a curriculum in which children study a coherent sequence of specific knowledge that builds year by year. E.D. Hirsch has consistently argued that the best way to reduce the gaps among social, economic, and racial groups in America is to provide equal access to knowledge. The goal of educators is to present and to instill a content rich and responsible stock of knowledge that can be expanded upon throughout the grades. Ideally, this curriculum would be nationwide, providing a consistent education for all students across the country so that if a child moved from one state to another, The expectations would be that the educational process would pick up at the same place in the new state, where it left off in the previous one. This is can be done, but only if every school across the country adopted the same curriculum. While this may not be realistic for the immediate future, there is no better place to start than where you are now. Following mandated state minimum requirements and supplementing with missing specific shared content, schools can individually make their own leap to this end.
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Last updated 07/11/03 School Web Master Eileen Crawford |
core knowledge foundation
