letter to ed hirsch: cultural literacy |

Context:

This was a short essay written in response to a reading -- a short snippet from "Cultural Literacy", by Ed Hirsch. In a manner characteristic of most people of his age, he preaches about the dangers of technology, mercilessly criticizing his students' intelligence for not being "culturally literate", for not knowing things he deems "important", such as the date that the Declaration of Independence was adopted. I wrote this in WRT105, my first-year composition class; so this is not my best work. However, Hirsch's rhetoric is so common and so incredibly, stupidly laughable that I stand by the points I've made in this response; I think it's an important perspective to share, especially in an age where technological skill is seen as a horrible and shallow thing by many older adults, instead of a valuable asset in an age that has moved past them.

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I usually go into academic readings -- especially ones written by people who grew up in a different time -- with an open mind. However, the disdain I felt for Hirsch's readings surprised me. I can see how an instructor might find his readings important to relay to future generations -- but from the short snippet that was given us to read in class, I respectfully disagree.

The author tries to apply the blanket term of “youthful ignorance” to today’s teenagers based on vague statistics about how many students know specific historical dates, stories from his son’s stories teaching high school students Latin, and national academic grade averages. None of these things should reflect on the capabilities of said student's let alone the intelligence of an entire generation.

I, too, don’t know the exact date that the Declaration of Independence was adopted, but I use SSH File Transfer Protocol and manage server networks daily as the system administrator of a video-game company; while I've known older people who don’t even know how to open the camera on an iPhone. Yesterday, I was texting a friend --  a bio/chemistry major -- who didn’t know who wrote Frankenstein, but could go on to discuss the implications of consuming nadolol bendroflumethiazide and sulfamethoxazole trimethoprim. Another friend mistakes “their” for “they’re” sometimes, but he can build a high-functioning PC from scratch and spare parts. My girlfriend gets so stressed about paper assignments that she can't sleep at night, but she can wield a paint brush like a weapon; she can't write an essay on color theory, but her use of brilliant, vibrant hues can pierce any heart. 

They do not deserve to be called ignorant, the way these teenagers don’t deserve to be simply because they don’t know about an ancient poem written by Homer. Eloquence is not and will never be equal to intelligence, despite what and we as a species has only come so far because we are able to 

With the advance of technology, the standards at which we hold the youth need to change as well. Knowing when the civil war ended will not help us in our jobs writing technical manuals and feasibility reports for multi-million companies like Google. It would take three seconds flat to google the Bill of Rights, and we have the liberty now of not remembering these details to make room in our minds for information and skills that older generations could not begin to even imagine. The lack of memorization of things that we don’t need in our lives has absolutely no relevance in our literacy and communication skills.

The only display of ignorance I’ve seen in this article is the unfortunately-common refusal, on part of older generations, to accept that the world is moving on, socially and technologically, and that sitting around in their armchairs complaining about “youthful ignorance” will only ever serve to impede humanity’s progress as a whole.