On Monday morning, while milking the goats, apparently a spider decided my cheek would make a tasty breakfast. I didn’t feel anything, but by the time I came inside to filter the milk my cheek was red and hot and was beginning to swell. Chris noticed and asked what had happened, but I had no idea. I got ready for school and headed off to work, sure that I would be just fine. By the time I got to work, my eye was twitching and swelling and everything was a bit hazy. The students who come into my class in the mornings were a bit concerned, to say the least. And several of them went to get a colleague who is also a good friend. She walked to the school nurse with me and then drove me to the ER when the school nurse said we definitely needed to head that way. To make what is turning into a long story a bit shorter, after some Benadryl and steroids at the emergency room, I was on the mend. My eye and cheek still looked pretty nasty, and I was tired from the Benadryl; but I knew the cosmetic and physical effects were temporary.
That afternoon, when I went to pick Del up from daycare, I commented to the very nice woman who watches her in the afternoons that I “felt a bit like Quasimodo.” She looked at me as though I was speaking a foreign language. Technically, I guess I was, but I expected her to get the reference. I thought for sure that the allusion to Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame was at least well known enough through Disney’s horrific cartoon for her to have a picture of the character I was referencing. I thought wrong.
That afternoon, when I went to pick Del up from daycare, I commented to the very nice woman who watches her in the afternoons that I “felt a bit like Quasimodo.” She looked at me as though I was speaking a foreign language. Technically, I guess I was, but I expected her to get the reference. I thought for sure that the allusion to Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame was at least well known enough through Disney’s horrific cartoon for her to have a picture of the character I was referencing. I thought wrong.
So, for the rest of the evening while I iced my swollen cheek/eye and lay in a Benadryl-Prednisone fugue, I thought about the quandary of cultural literacy. Where did it go? And why did understanding literary and cultural references from our past become unimportant? The declension from literary and historical allusions has been steady over the last generation - "Generation Like" as coined by the Frontline documentary -- and it is evidence of a far greater, far more pervasive problem in education as a whole.
The term "cultural literacy" was coined by E.D. Hirsch in 1987, and his treatment of the importance of learning a standardized set of classical knowledge has been debated ever since. In a 2009 article by Bernard Schweizer, though, the points that have been bothering me since my spider bite are clear, concise, and (in my humble opinion) correct. Schweizer's "Cultural Literacy: Is it Time to Revisit the Debate?" contends that, by not requiring cultural literacy to be taught in our public schools, we are creating "a society separated into the haves and the have-nots with regard to a well-rounded education." Essentially, "cultural literacy" is a code spoken by the affluent students and adults and serves as a method to "weed out" others from their socio-economic circle. He goes on to suggest that we (those who are not affluent) must therefore learn the code if we ever hope to raise ourselves beyond our beginnings. Otherwise, we are only serving to widen the gulf that exists between the classes. I think it's more than that, though.
In one paragraph of Schweizer's article, he briefly touches on what really bothers me about the lack of cultural literacy. In that paragraph, he mentions an article he handed to his college students. The article, by a writer named Bill McKibben, is about global warming, but there are myriad allusions in the article that reference other historical, cultural, literary events or people. His students didn't get the references, so they didn't understand the article. "Take all the (un-footnoted) references to Gandhi, Hemingway, Miguel de Cervantes, Orwell, Thoreau, and the Bible out of McKibben's essay, remove all the idiomatic expressions and cut the literary allusions, and you end up with a deflated text that looks as if it had been gone over by a censor's pen in some weird dystopia. Little do we know that a large proportion of our young students are already inhabiting such a world." That's what was bothering me. Right there. Without the allusions, many of our greatest pieces of literature are left flat, one-dimensional. Every known allusion becomes another layer of connection, another piece of the puzzle of our history, another strand of foundation to reference. And too many of our students are trying to read what we're asking them to read without any of those connections, without any of those layers. No wonder so many kids don't like reading.
If ogres have layers and onions have layers (and parfaits, too, let's not forget parfaits), why does it surprise us that our literature also has layers? Without them, we lose the richness, the beauty of the piece. And that is unforgiveable.
So, I'm on a new crusade -- the crusade to combat the crisis of cultural literacy. (I couldn't resist the alliteration, sorry). In the next year, I'm going to see how many of the texts and references from Hirsch's famous list I can expose my students and my kids to in order to help create that layer of richness and complexity that makes literature not just interesting, but beautful. "As God is my witness..."
The term "cultural literacy" was coined by E.D. Hirsch in 1987, and his treatment of the importance of learning a standardized set of classical knowledge has been debated ever since. In a 2009 article by Bernard Schweizer, though, the points that have been bothering me since my spider bite are clear, concise, and (in my humble opinion) correct. Schweizer's "Cultural Literacy: Is it Time to Revisit the Debate?" contends that, by not requiring cultural literacy to be taught in our public schools, we are creating "a society separated into the haves and the have-nots with regard to a well-rounded education." Essentially, "cultural literacy" is a code spoken by the affluent students and adults and serves as a method to "weed out" others from their socio-economic circle. He goes on to suggest that we (those who are not affluent) must therefore learn the code if we ever hope to raise ourselves beyond our beginnings. Otherwise, we are only serving to widen the gulf that exists between the classes. I think it's more than that, though.
In one paragraph of Schweizer's article, he briefly touches on what really bothers me about the lack of cultural literacy. In that paragraph, he mentions an article he handed to his college students. The article, by a writer named Bill McKibben, is about global warming, but there are myriad allusions in the article that reference other historical, cultural, literary events or people. His students didn't get the references, so they didn't understand the article. "Take all the (un-footnoted) references to Gandhi, Hemingway, Miguel de Cervantes, Orwell, Thoreau, and the Bible out of McKibben's essay, remove all the idiomatic expressions and cut the literary allusions, and you end up with a deflated text that looks as if it had been gone over by a censor's pen in some weird dystopia. Little do we know that a large proportion of our young students are already inhabiting such a world." That's what was bothering me. Right there. Without the allusions, many of our greatest pieces of literature are left flat, one-dimensional. Every known allusion becomes another layer of connection, another piece of the puzzle of our history, another strand of foundation to reference. And too many of our students are trying to read what we're asking them to read without any of those connections, without any of those layers. No wonder so many kids don't like reading.
If ogres have layers and onions have layers (and parfaits, too, let's not forget parfaits), why does it surprise us that our literature also has layers? Without them, we lose the richness, the beauty of the piece. And that is unforgiveable.
So, I'm on a new crusade -- the crusade to combat the crisis of cultural literacy. (I couldn't resist the alliteration, sorry). In the next year, I'm going to see how many of the texts and references from Hirsch's famous list I can expose my students and my kids to in order to help create that layer of richness and complexity that makes literature not just interesting, but beautful. "As God is my witness..."