Cultural Literacy
by E. D. Hirsch · first published 1987
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5HN commenters
2013–2023first – last mentioned
20% recommend80% neutral
Discusses how to enable students to make sense of what they read through prior knowledge of events, etc.
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…to teach college freshman that simply didn't have the background knowledge to understand the college level books Hirsch was teaching, even though they had no problem reading the words. Hirsch's books "Cultural Literacy" and "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" go into detail about this and he has some essays available online that are worth reading.
on “In Praise of Memorization” ↗…on the reference page, but I have seen accounts of first-graders really taking to culture-and-civilization (and picture book) focussed units around "Ancient Egypt" etc. IIRC, E.D. Hirsch, in his book Cultural Literacy, related a conversation with educators. He offerred that children should be able to name and identify Earth's continents. As he reports it, the reply as if with disbelief was "Why would anyone need to…
on “Show HN: I 3D scanned the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza” ↗…training the next generation to get into the elite. E.D. Hirsch [1] has written a lot about needing to know content in order to properly reason. Some of this goes by classical education, elsewhere it's cultural literacy [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy
on “Only a few countries are teaching children how to think” ↗Remember the 90s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pa6SGYWADU E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote "Cultural Literacy" in 1987, with an update in 2002 as "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". It's a huge collection of thousands of words/phrases/concepts/devices/people/places/etc, across multiple categories, that…
on “Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?” ↗…haven't looked at literacy performance in the country, but I'd guess it's declining like it is in the USA, as Australia is subject to broadly the same pressures of political-economy and technology. 1. Cultural Literacy by E.D Hirsch Jr 2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517094842.h...
on “Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning” ↗