Cultural Literacy
Last night, inspired by a response to my deliberately vague Question of the Week, I picked up my old worn-out copy of Dune. I was assigned the book in high school twenty years ago, and still have the same copy, which means either they had given it to us, or more likely, I never got around to returning it.
Still tucked into the almost definitely stolen book is a bookmark that also must have been given to us in high school. It’s a “Cultural Literacy” bookmark, based on the book by E.D. Hirch that came out at about that time. My high school English teacher was a huge proponent of this book which literally listed pages and pages of references that a culturally literate person should know. Our teacher, who yet was cool enough to assign us Dune and Catch 22 (which I also somehow still have), would photocopy the pages of the book and assign us cultural references to look up and present to the class.
The bookmark has a very small sampling of these terms, which includes basal metabolism, taproot, intransitive verb, Tito, ombudsman, capital gains, and byte. If you can’t define all of those terms, this bookmark says you’re illiterate.
Hey, in 1987, byte was a toughie.
And that’s really the point here. This bookmark just screams the point: You can’t know what students will need to know in twenty years. The skills needed today are so much more complex than memorizing lists of references. In a constantly changing world, creativity and the ability to learn new skills are far more important than knowing offhand what a Eustachian tube is. If I did learn that in high school, it’s gone now, and I don’t seem to miss it.
And I do think kids need to learn facts. But facts need to be learned in context. If historical dates are important, it’s only because they allow us to understand how two or more events are connected to each other. Did we invade Iraq before or after 9/11? Knowing that can profoundly affect our understanding of both events.
If, in the future, both events were scattered among a list of “cultural literacy” items and students were required to look them up and present them to a class, that sense of context would be lost. Much better to give them authentic tasks that allow them to construct meaningful understandings. They’ll still learn the facts, and will remember them longer.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:27 am
You had a teacher who assigned DUNE? How cool was he/she! That is one of my all-time favorite books!
In response to your posting, I am in total agreement. We can’t possibly know what we’ll need to know, but learning how to learn and think critically about what we learn is paramount.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
“In a constantly changing world, creativity and the ability to learn new skills are far more important than knowing offhand what a Eustachian tube is.”
THAT is my QUOTE OF THE YEAR. That completely sums up your insightful and important argument. I’m SO glad you work in education – the world is undoubtably going to be better for it.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
And I just wiki’d Eustachian tube because you inspired me to find out what it was. Seems I had it in me the whole time!!! Who knew it was right under my nose !!!(well kinda – not exactly – but I couldn’t resist the pun :-) )
See how smarter I get everyday cuz you’re around?
Thanks you.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
DeLisa, thanks for your sweet comments.
But are you really smarter for knowing what a Eustachian tube is? Or did you bring the real smarts when you used skills that didn’t exist when you were in school to locate the precise bit of information you were looking for?
And, Annalisa, I suspected you were a Dune fan when you made reference to the Gom Jabbar. I had to look it up, and that’s when I found the bookmark.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:59 am
“Or did you bring the real smarts when you used skills that didn’t exist when you were in school to locate the precise bit of information you were looking for?”
That’s what I was implying actually – in concurrence with your original argument. In my mind, the best teachers don’t teach you information (and I agree that some of that is important and valuable), but they serve their greatest purpose in teach you the tools to discover it on your own and inspiring you to use them. You inspired me to use them. See? :-)
October 12th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Just like Annalisa inspired you to use them re: Dune. She loves those books. I should totally read them….soon.
October 12th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Technically, it was Brian’s post that inspired me to look up the reference in Dune so I could post it to the thread. But when I returned to the thread, Annalisa had already posted the reference I had looked up. But I take your point.
Brian is also way into the Dune series, or at least he once was. When he was a kid, he read all six books. He encouraged me to do the same, but I’ve only ever read the one I was assigned in high school. It was great, though. Definitely the coolest thing I read in high school. So much more fun than that boring Shakespeare guy everybody thinks was so great.
Actually, that’s the one criticism I have of her. I can’t really fault her for jumping on the cultural literacy bandwagon; it was the eighties – everybody was doing it. But she completely failed to ignite in me an interest in Shakespeare. A year later, I was in college and acting in Twelfth Night, which started me on my current path. But we did a lot of Shakespeare in her class, and none of it really stuck with me.
On the other hand, she’s the one who first got me into Plato. And she taught me how to write a sonnet. And she did drill us on vocabulary we’d need for the SAT. Which, combined with her letter of recommendation, helped me get into college. She also believed in me when others did not, including myself at times. So how did we manage to miss connecting me with Shakespeare?
May 18th, 2008 at 1:03 am
The pendulum swings of the pedagogic: What every ‘!’ should know.
It (deliberately vague, no clear usage) stems from a vision of learning, from a vision of knowledge and of skills – some of which are very ‘common sense’ and very wrong.
The trouble is, increasing someone’s active vocabulary is one thing, defining it as ‘should know’ is another.
You have to have something to work on – and the idea of metabolism is as good as any other (so too with Dune, or PG Wodehouse – something every respectable English Gentleman should know).