We celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next month. Fanfare is required. So is fact-fare. I asked a party of people “What is the big deal about the Declaration? What really happened on July 4, 1776, that merits our celebration? The Declaration refers to “unalienable rights.” Who does the Declaration imbue with these rights? Everyone?”
Nationally, Pew surveys tell us that 53% of Americans cannot identify the underlying reasons for the writing of the Declaration. Most think that July 4 is the date it was approved by the 13 colonies. Most are not aware that white males had unalienable rights, but women, children, enslaved people, and Native Americans did not. And in most colonies, the religion and economics of a man mattered in deciding their unalienability.
Is knowing these important? The lack of this knowledge will not affect the fireworks coloring the skies or the beer and hot dogs consumed at picnics on July 4th. Knowing though does tell us that the Declaration was not an isolated event 250 years ago but the beginning of a process for all Americans to achieve the unalienable rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. Work is still in progress.
How broad and deep is your general background knowledge? Yep, I am talking about the answers to Jeopardy-like questions. And the kinds of questions that arise in any active conversation that relies on knowing things. When asked factual questions, what percentage of the time do you know the answer and what percentage of the time do you Google, Siri, or AI an answer? Does knowing things make a difference?
What are we talking about?
Cultural literacy is a person’s capacity to understand, discuss, and use the unwritten background knowledge that we take for granted. A literate person knows the literal definition of words, explanations of concepts, has recall of facts, and can fluently talk about these. Literacy includes a working knowledge of shared symbols, references, and traditions of our historical and contemporary life. Like a jack-of-all-trades, the culturally literate are widely knowledgeable though not expert on all.
In the 1980s E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know considered 5,000 words, names, concepts, and events that a person should know to be knowledgeably conversant. To not know these meant a person is handicapped in general conversations.
Another measure is a person’s general vocabulary. Assessments show that high school graduates have a confident working knowledge of about 50,000 words. Working vocabulary allows a person to read complex and complicated materials. When a person knows 95% of the words in what they read or hear, they can contextually know the meaning of words they do not know. But when 5% or more of the words are unknown, a person gets lost and stops reading.
The contemporariness of knowledge also is important. In the 1950s Buckminster Fuller estimated that prior to 1900 human knowledge doubled every 100 years. By 1945, he posited knowledge was doubling every 25 years, and by the 1980s knowledge was doubling every 13-14 months. Cultural content changes with the times. Some of Hirsch’s 5,000 would still be valid and other key items replaced by more current knowledge.
Why is knowing things essential?
So that you can connect the dots. Cause and effect are still at work in our world. Most recently a knowledge of world geography, geopolitics, and geoeconomics have been essential to understanding the wars between the US and Iran; Israel and Gaza/Lebanon/Iran; Russia and Ukraine; the Ebola outbreak in the Congo and the lack of US aid; China and Taiwan; and the Trump tariffs on world trade. Each of these alone influences the world. Taken as a whole, the world continues in a state of constant combativeness.
So that false facts and special interests do not misinform you. The stream of everyday news is constant and the biases within it grow ever more powerful. Literacy allows a person to weigh the value and importance of what is said and who is saying it. Bias and prejudice grow as most of the news is owned by a small group of the wealthy elite. We have lost daily, local news and objective state and national news.
So that you do not become passive. Understanding different points of view, underlying causation, predictive outcomes, and the ever-present unintended consequences cause the informed to be more creative in proposing changes and alternatives. A lack of knowledge favors the status quo.
So that AI is not your personal brain power. It would be too easy for a person to give up on knowing. Why do you need to know if you can just ask Siri or orally ask your AI personal agent on your phone. And, voila! Your AI agent is you.
The Big Duh!
If the cure for obesity is to “eat less and move more,” then the cure of cultural illiteracy is to “acquiesce less and read, talk, and engage more.”
We can put the “literacy spurs” to children in school by decreasing the quantity and increasing the quality of information they learn. Quantity is not their friend. Academic content is learned in the “Reader’s Digest” format; it is condensed. It is true that most students seldom finish reading an entire book in school. They are given summaries instead. So, they know a lot of summaries but little of what makes literature great or why a non-fiction work is “must know” information.
We need to be E.D. Hirsch-like and constantly harvest the “required” information for children to learn. There is so much history, science, and literature that children get a glimpse at most. If children before 1999 needed a full school year to study American or world history, how do we expect them to learn both the pre-1999 and everything since 2000 in the same number of school weeks? The same is true of science and the arts. Our school curriculum has bloomed large, and it needs weeding.
And children need engagement experiences at all ages. This is not our engaging them, but their engaging with each other and with people outside the school. During early childhood through graduation, their primary engagement is with faculty. They need to engage with the world, and then consider it, talk about it, and analyze and evaluate it with their faculty.
The world of information is growing by the second these days. As it expands, our next generation needs improved tools to know it, understand it, and deal with it.