Cultural Literacy is Bunk

The latest issue of the National Education Association's journal Thought and Action (Vol. 25, Fall 2009) just arrived, including an article suggesting we reconsider the value of cultural literacy (Cultural Literacy: Is it time to revisit the debate? by Bernard Schweizer, Associate Professor, Long Island University).

I was compelled to put aside my syllabi generating and respond. Out of sheer laziness I have cut and pasted my own letter below, but I will give you the executive summary:
Schweizer is rethinking his opposition to making canon fodder of our students because he is so appalled by their inability to catch literary allusions. He couches the argument in "fight the power" terms by saying that by failing to make our students culturally literate we are preventing them from entering the inner circle inhabited by graduates of Choate and Andover and Harvard and Yale etc. I simply call forth my old Wesleyan Prof. Dick Ohmann who writes that this is exactly backwards. Cultural literacy comes from sharing an experience in the classroom that gets our students engaged in the material. We the teachers are the arbiters of this culture and we must construct this culture in partnership with our students actively and continually. But I said it better below.


January 11, 2010

Dear Editors,

I sympathize with Bernard Schweizer (Cultural Literacy, Fall 2009) in his disappointment with his graduate training, but his desire to reach for the water-logged life ring of “Cultural Literacy” gets it exactly backwards. I can do no better than to reference Professor Richard Ohmann (Emertitus of English, Wesleyan University) whose essay “The Function of English at the Present Time”* presents a critique of the cultural literacy battle; his critique remains incisive today, 23 years after its publication. Still, I would offer Schweizer – and all of us concerned with the intellectual incuriosity of our students – a solution less radical than Ohmann's hope for some sort of social revolution and less accommodationist (a bomb thrower might call it “collaborationist”) than that offered by Schweizer.

Like Schweizer, Ohmann explores the ideas of E.D. Hirsch but turns to Hirsch's foil Bill Bennett for the really juicy quotes. Ohmann takes on Bennett's assertion that students do not get “an adequate education in the culture and civilization of which they are members” by asking simply: “If they don't, in what sense are they 'members' of it? Is culture something hidden in mysteries? Is it not the practices and beliefs of a people?” Hirsch may be more flexible than Bennett, more willing to accept that the choice of what bits and pieces of the culture should be deemed fundamental is a difficult political minefield. But for Ohmann, all purveyors of the cultural literacy agenda “neglect to wonder how one might legislate democracy in spheres of culture and education when there is no democracy, no equality, no empowerment for the many outside those spheres.”

Ohmann saw hegemony at work in the strange bedfellows the cultural literacy agenda made of Hirsch and Bennet. He saw too that education is about sorting the haves from the have nots, a view Schweizer seems to share. Nevertheless, Ohmann wrote at a time when all cultural critics recognized television as our common culture. To the culture czars television is a vast wasteland. Technological change and the success of the empowerment movements of the last few decades (helped in part by those in the academy) has robbed us of even that dubiously valuable common ground. First cable television and now the internet have allowed us to slice our media environment into slivers so thin they can no longer be termed “mass”. Communities that want to see themselves reflected on the screen, whether they be gay, Latino, or even white men, can choose their own particular channels and websites. Certainly there still are broadcast networks, but ask your students how many of them watch scheduled programs. Then see how many shows they have in common. (If your students are like mine, you will find as I did that they are as culturally estranged from their instructors as they are from one another.) The Balkanization of our culture means that not only can we not refer easily to Orwell and Ghandi and Hemingway, we can't even call on our common knowledge of Fonzie, Big Bird, or Walter Cronkite.

In other words, even without asking the politically difficult question of what our canonical texts should be, we are hard pressed to find common points of reference. Without a common language of experience, art or metaphor we are reduced merely to grunt and gesture with our students. What then are we to do?

Certainly we could have a committee convene and dictate a set of cultural content for our students to memorize and then test them on it as they make their way toward post-secondary education. But wait, haven't we already been trying that since the Clinton era? That's what the dreaded “standards movement” is all about. If my students are any indication, it just doesn't work. The State of Massachusetts thinks they know who Chairman Mao is, but if they ever did, most certainly don't now.

Instead, can we not empower students to use the powerful tools at their fingertips (and increasingly their thumbs) to fake their way into the privileged circles that Schweizer identifies. Rather than warning students away from Wikipedia and Google as so many teachers do, why not insist that they look up all of the things that they don't understand? One need not approach Bill McKibben's essay on climate change (the subject of Schweizer's extended analysis) with a mind that has already read Hemingway's short stories or Orwell's Animal Farm to follow his argument. Indeed a close examination of the context of McKibben's references reveals that students need not know the “classics” at all to understand the essay. Yes McKibben writes that the “Snows of Kilimanjaro are set to become the rocks of Kilimanjaro”, but he is writing about the climate atop a real 4,600 meter mountain in Tanzania (I just looked the height and location up on Wikipedia), not the themes of Hemingway's short story of the same name. Yes, he “paraphrases Orwell” when he writes that we will all be hot but some will be hotter than others, but it is a bogus reference having nothing to do with economic or political inequality and thus nothing really to do with Animal Farm. I certainly want students to have the intellectual curiosity to look up Orwell and the sophistication not to focus on the fact that his real name is Eric Arthur Blair (a headline fact on Wikipedia).

This last example seems to prove Schweizer's point that “cultural literacy” is less about being smart and more about being part of the in crowd. Scratch beneath the surface a bit and I expect we'll find that most of our economic and cultural elites – the ones Schweizer identifies as attending the fancy prep schools and ivy leagues – know a lot less about the things they reference than they seem to. How many know, for example that when FCC chairman Newton N. Minow gave his “Wasteland Speech” on May 9, 1961 (thanks Wikipedia!) he actually said that when television is good it is better than theater, magazines, or newspapers? Does E.D. Hirsch? Does Bill Bennett? The point is this: our students may not have the same facts in their heads as their betters do, but the real enemy is willful ignorance and an incuriosity that is gleefully shared across class lines.

We do need to find a common language to speak to our students, but not by parroting the trivia of a snobbish elite. The answer, of course, is to actually listen to them as individuals and find the cultural references that help make the point. In your classroom, the culture czar is you. Perhaps at the end of the semester, your 25 or 125 or 325 students will be able to wink to one another with knowing references. Make sure those references are to texts that are meaningful and vibrant and, yes, classic, and perhaps those references will stay with them after graduation. Better still, perhaps the learning bug will bite them too.

Daniel Albert
Assistant Professor of History
Salem State College, Salem, Massachusetts
dalbert@salemstate.edu
exchaoordo@gmail.com


* Richard Ohmann, Politics of Letters, (Wesleyan, 1987).