Education Next – Robert Pondiscio
“Nearly thirty years ago, a then-obscure University of Virginia professor named E.D. Hirsch, Jr. set off a hot national debate with the publication of Cultural Literacy. The book was an out-of-nowhere hit, spending six months on the New York Times best seller list on the strength of its list of five thousand people, events, books, and phrases that Hirsch declared “every American should know.” Eric Liu, the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program, wants to revisit Hirsch’s list. Building on his recent essay, “How to Be American,” Liu argues that the United States needs such common knowledge more than ever, but that “a twenty-first-century sense of cultural literacy has to be radically more diverse and inclusive.” Liu has launched an intriguing effort to crowd-source a 2016 version of Hirsch’s famous list—which, in retrospect, was a double-edged sword: It made Cultural Literacy a best seller, but it also resulted in the book becoming what Dan Willingham has called “the most misunderstood education book of the past fifty years.” It also came out the same year as Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, an equally unlikely success. Both were tarred with a “conservative” label. (For his part, Hirsch recently insisted, “I’m practically a socialist.”).”(more)