Dumbing-Down: How Low Can We Go Here In America.”

 
 


 Published in 1988, this book created a heated discussion . . .

 being able to read [and understand] is one of the biggest "challenges" is as they say "one of the biggest challenges" for Pluralistic Ignorance - surprising to say that Illiteracy is now classified as a Functional Dis-Ability here in America.
But it goes deeper than that when "The Melting Pot" myth has disintegrated with everyone trying to find new identities or hanging-on to the old separate-and-equal false lines of discrimination . . . confirmation-biases where we retreat to tribal enclaves of where we choose to live and who we choose to associate with. We may like our own "comfort zones" but there is no comfort in the fact that we as a nation are more divided than ever before.
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The author argues that children in the United States are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. They lack cultural literacy--a grasp of background information that writers and speakers assume their audience already has.

At the end of the book Hirsch and two colleagues tacked on an appendix: an unannotated list of about 5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts that, in their view, “every American needs to know.” The appendix became a sensation and propelled the book to the top of the best-seller list.

The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion. (From a page drawn at random: Cotton Mather, Andrew Mellon, Herman Melville).Conservatives thus embraced Hirsch eagerly and breathlessly. He was a stout defender of the patrimony. Liberals eagerly and breathlessly attacked him with equal vigor. He was retrograde, Eurocentric, racist, sexist. His list was a last gasp (or was it a fierce counterattack?) by a fading (or was it resurgent?) white establishment. 

Almost 30 years later: here we are

What Every American Should Know

Defining common cultural literacy for an increasingly diverse nation

Eric Liu Jul 3, 2015 

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07 

Is the culture war over?
That seems an absurd question.
This is an age when Confederate monuments still stand; when white-privilege denialism is surging on social media; when legislators and educators in Arizona and Texas propose banning ethnic studies in public schools and assign textbooks euphemizing the slave trade; when fear of Hispanic and Asian immigrants remains strong enough to prevent immigration reform in Congress; when the simple assertion that #BlackLivesMatter cannot be accepted by all but is instead contested petulantly by many non-blacks as divisive, even discriminatory.
And that’s looking only at race. Add gender, guns, gays, and God to the mix and the culture war seems to be raging along quite nicely.
Yet from another perspective, much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.
Imagine that this is true; that this decades-long war is about to give way to something else. The question then arises: What? What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been. And that awareness demands a new kind of mirror.
It helps first to consider some recent history. In 1987, a well-regarded professor of English at the University of Virginia named E.D. Hirsch Jr. published a slim volume called Cultural Literacy. Most of the book was an argument—textured and subtle, not overtly polemical—about why nations need a common cultural vocabulary and why public schools should teach it and, indeed, think of their very reason for being as the teaching of that vocabulary.
At the end of the book Hirsch and two colleagues tacked on an appendix: an unannotated list of about 5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts that, in their view, “every American needs to know.” The rest (to use a phrase that probably should’ve been on the list) was history.
The appendix became a sensation and propelled the book to the top of the best-seller list. Hirsch became that rare phenomenon: a celebrity intellectual. His list was debated in every serious publication and elite circles. . .
Lost in all the crossfire, however, were two facts: First, Hirsch, a lifelong Democrat who considered himself progressive, believed his enterprise to be in service of social justice and equality. Cultural illiteracy, he argued, is most common among the poor and power-illiterate, and compounds both their poverty and powerlessness. Second: He was right.
you have a single overriding objective shared by all immigrants at the moment of arrival: figure out how stuff really gets done here.
That means understanding what’s being said in public, in the media, in colloquial conversation. It means understanding what’s not being said. Literacy in the culture confers power, or at least access to power. Illiteracy, whether willful or unwitting, creates isolation from power. And so any endeavor that makes it easier for those who do not know the memes and themes of American civic life to attain them closes the opportunity gap. It is inherently progressive.

Of course, it’s not just newcomers who need greater command of common knowledge. People whose families have been here ten generations are often as ignorant about American traditions, mores, history, and idioms as someone “fresh off the boat.”

The challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts.

Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.