Cultural Literacy

Reading E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, one of those rare academic works that found a wider audience (sidenote: why do the books that do this always have awesome titles? To wit, The Closing of the American Mind, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Organization Man, How to Read a Book. Part of me thinks that more people buy these books for their cool title and because they look good on a bookshelf than actually read them, but that sounds rather cynical and unlike me.) I really like Hirsch’s perspective, classically liberal as it is, and here he argues that radical politics must be grounded in conservative knowledge of language and culture:

“Radicalism in politics, but conservatism in literate knowledge and spelling: to be a conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.

To withhold traditional culture from school curriculum, and therefore from students, in the name of progressive ideas is in fact an unprogressive action that helps preserve the political and economic status quo. Middle-class children acquire mainstream literate culture by daily encounters with other literate persons. But less privileged children are denied consistent interchanges with literate persons and fail to receive this information in school. The most straightforward antidote to their deprivation is to make the essential information more readily available inside the schools.”

There was a woman in my graduate program, very intelligent, one of the smartest people there, who wrote a paper on alternative languages and how we need to find room for different colloquialisms or slangs in the contemporary classroom. In other words, making all students use “proper” English is oppressive and unfair to those who were never taught proper English in the first place. I understand and sympathize with her point. All of us as graduate teachers taught students who were incredibly underprepared for the relatively pedestrian rigors of an introductory writing course. Students who could barely comprehend the content of a simply written newspaper article, let alone string together a coherent, well-reasoned response to that article. It was sad, and tempting to play down to the lowest common denominator.

But what Hirsch is pressing toward, and what I certainly noticed while teaching, is that it is not merely deficiencies in language usage or grammar that is keeping these students back. It is what I mentioned in the previous paragraph: there is no reading comprehension to begin with. So, it is not as if I had students write papers that deeply engaged with the text to which they were responding but did so in colloquial language. Rather, the two seemed to be of a pair. The students who wrote in slang also struggled mightily to comprehend the none-too-difficult content of the texts we read and discussed. To turn what I am saying into an aphorism: you have to understand the system before you can subvert it. My students who had poor grammar had a poor understanding of the system of the English language (for the most part, nothing of course being true in all cases).

I remember listening to this fellow student read this well-meaning paper about how we should allow and encourage students to be rebellious and subversive in the way they use language, and thinking how entirely she had missed the point. My problem was twofold. Firstly, most of the students who enroll in English 100 are not going to go on to careers as journalists or authors or college professors. Most will take jobs in business or engineering or construction or nursing or elementary education or go into debt and become lawyers and what they will really need to know is not how to be subversive with their language or ironic in their company emails but how to not sound like idiots when they speak or write like people who missed everything after early phonics instruction. What they need, then, if they are ever truly going to be able to challenge the system, or find it worthwhile to do so, is to know the system really well. That, as I saw it, was our job as teachers.

My second problem stems from this first problem and is the main point in my response: subversion is meaningless if you don’t understand the system you’re subverting. This is why so many atheistic critiques of religion fall short: they seem to equate Christianity with the Crusades, eliding the quite obvious fact that most Christians these days are not motivated by a desire to reclaim the Holy Land from its Muslim occupiers. And a critique of English grammar, of which there are many valid points of entry, will not sound right unless it is couched in the terms of contemporary English grammar. If one were attempting to foment rebellion in China, one wouldn’t publish a pamphlet in French. The same principle applies.

Even our rebels, then, must in some measure enslave themselves to the system if they wish at some point to truly challenge it. I think the kids these days call that irony.