E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Literacy Theory

I understand the seesaw arguments here, as I too, find myself running between a pro/con perspective on Hirsch. Maya's comments made me wonder if there was a way to find middle ground in between the essential point of Hirsch's theory and the very relevant criticism of dominant cultural values, blindness to the many social contexts of learning, and the value of a critical literacy approach to learning.
Maybe the usefulness of a cultural literacy framework rests on taking a critical literacy approach to knowledge instruction. This way, taking the "cultural" definitions of the dominant culture and fashioning them to the particular context the educator is working in, could mean an integration of local and then larger contexts of cultural understanding. Maybe the same seesawing some of us feel in trying to accommodate the practical in his theory with the actual cultural values in a population could be used proactively as a study of polarities: the externalized "background" content, detached from the local and immediate culture, could be studied (and evaluated) in direct relation to the culturally immediate, socially-based, communally-valued content, leading to understandings and conclusions of relative value: is something important if it happened before your lifetime? Why or why not? How might our community concerns be linked to the historically placed event? Does its importance to us shift if we find larger value in it? Or do we decide it is ultimately of no use to us, socially and culturally? As educators,do we begin with the culturally immediate and branch out, into the larger society? Or start in the abstract and remote, and work our way into our immediate cultures?
Of course, this seems to demand that educators do double-duty: dissemination of a faceless criteria by the powers of the moment, coupled with juxtaposition of the local and immediate to offset the disabling elements of an "objective" list of knowledge content. But double duty is where we are in any case, as we are asked to satisfy standardized learning and result goals while still attempting to facilitate learning, growth and critical thinking.