E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Cultural Literacy: The Legacy a Generation Later

All education is going to acculturate anyway – even if only into a subculture.

                                                                                    E.D. Hirsch Jr., New York Times, May 1990

They had me pegged as a reactionary, but my impulses were more revolutionary. You have to give the people who are without power the tools of power, and these tools of power don’t care who’s wielding them.

                                                                        E.D. Hirsch Jr., New York Times, September 2013

Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, published by E.D. Hirsch Jr. in 1988, became a best-seller, initiating strong debates in the educational community. In this and subsequent books, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, as well as others, Hirsch diagnosed and addressed American literacy failures as a lack of cultural literacy, (background knowledge), which he recommended be placed at the center, or core, of pedagogical instruction with indexes and digests of required subjects. Through his organization, the Core Knowledge Foundation, Hirsch and his colleagues, supported initially by the Exxon Education Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, began developing curriculum for K – 12^th grades that addresses the topics of background information as the key to improving literacy results in students through what is known as “The List”, a compilation of 5,000 topics recommended as basic cultural knowledge. Twenty five years later, forty-five out of fifty states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, a redefining of curriculum and pedagogical goals in schools K – 12 influenced by Hirsch’s theories. His concept and implementation has influenced a generation of thinking and although there has been sharp disagreement about his prescriptions, his influence has persisted. I will be looking at his ideas, and how it has contributed to education and reform today.

Background

E.D. Hirsch began his career in English poetry scholarship and hermeneutics, the study of literary interpretation. In his early books, Validity in Interpretation (1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (1976), Hirsch argued the supremacy of the author’s intentions, and made a distinction between “meaning”, created by the author, and “significance”, the perceptions of the reader, which were minority opinions He became the chair of the Composition Department at the University of Virginia, and wrote The Philosophy of Composition in 1977. In this book, he investigated his concept of the “readability factor” in texts: his theory held that the ease of text comprehension rested on the clarity of the "semantic intentions” of the author; the instruction of composition needed to focus on clarity of purpose in regards to the "semantic intentions” of the writer.  These theories were in contradiction with the deconstructionists of the time. (Wikipedia).  In his research on the “readability factor” with students from Richmond Virginia, their difficulties in decoding texts by Hegel and about Generals Lee and Grant led him to discover that background information was the stumbling block: these students did not know about the subjects they were reading on. The new findings of the research showed the importance of prior knowledge for full comprehension of the reading. Hirsch was galvanized into educational reform and pedagogy when he saw the gaps in the college students results in their literacy abilities. At a presentation at the Modern Language Association in 1981, he suggested there was a direct link between illiteracy and lack of cultural knowledge and expanded the concept in an essay for the American Scholar in 1983 entitled, “Cultural Literacy”.  Exxon Education Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and colleagues such as Diane Ravitch at Columbia University joined forces with Hirsch Jr. to support his research and development of these theories into curriculum through his organization, The Cultural Literacy Foundation, founded in 1986 (Hitchens).

Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

In his preface to Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,  Hirsch Jr. says, “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational conditions as their parents” (xiii). In order to head off any charges of prescriptivism, Hirsch is quick to add, “Cultural literacy is represented not by a prescriptive list of books but rather by a descriptive list of the information actually possessed by literate Americans” (xiv). Rousseau is criticized for his focus on the innate instincts of the developing child, and Dewey for his focus on skills, critical thinking and the child developmental model, which Hirsch Jr. maintains takes us away from the pressing educational need for a common cultural foundation. “History, not superior wisdom, shows us that neither the content-neutral curriculum of Rousseau and Dewey nor the narrowly specified curriculum of Plato is adequate to the needs of a modern nation” (xvi).  He counters Dewey’s rejection of symbols by defining shared symbols as the mark of a national community communicating effectively.

Hirsch Jr. begins his argument with asserting the need to have increasing levels of literacy as a nation in order to maintain our economic standing in the world.  “World knowledge” is the key to literacy skills, as Professor Chall, reading specialist, maintains. “The function of national literacy is to foster effective nationwide communications” (2).  The reasons for adhering to formal written Standard English is that it is “based upon forms that have been fixed in dictionaries and grammars and are adhered to in books, magazines, and newspapers” (3). The failure of students to understand written test material presented by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and results in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) illustrate the degradation of literacy skills, and the shared common knowledge needed for rudimentary public discourse as represented by conversation, news comprehension and civic understanding. Business opportunities are a benefit of a rounded cultural education, and the corporate world is quoted as anxious for literate employees. A distinction is made between the literacy needed for job-related materials and vocational training, which is too narrow, and the literacy of newspapers and public writing, which needs further development. Socially, the needs of the disenfranchised are addressed through the literacy opportunities of democracy in action, and access to news. Examples are given of culturally educated folks understanding enough  in the news to grasp a variety of topics and information. Social justice, democratic ideals, civic participation, all stem from a “mature literacy”. All this firmly proves the decline, and subsequent need to improve shared knowledge, and consequently, literacy (12).

 In looking at why cultural literacy teaching has declined, Hirsch speculates that the democratic process has been so taken for granted, it ebbed away without our noticing until now (19). The educational principles of Rousseau and Dewey also share the blame, as they have inculcated a perception that any subject is valid, as long as critical thinking and reasoning development is the focus; the Shopping Mall High School exemplifies the formalist educational theory with its array of choice.  In the face of charges that traditional materials represent the Euro-centric, white and Western perspectives, schools have retreated into excessive and overly reductive subjects. Here Hirsch maintains, “Although mainstream culture is tied to the written word and may therefore seem more formal and elitist than other elements of culture, that is an illusion. Literate culture is the most democratic in the land”(21). Traditional literate forms are the most effective for social change. Jeffersonian principles, Black Panther speeches, Oscar Wilde, Virginian history: all attest to the virtues of cultural knowledge, reflecting the strengths of the country.

 The recommendation to teach cultural literacy to young children early in their schooling is strongly stated, and evidence given of young children’s abilities to retain and memorize. Memorization is shown to be effective, and all basic cultural knowledge should be accomplished by age thirteen to produce a basically culturally literate student (32).

Hirsch Jr. brings in language research that is focused on memory and its functions, and role schemata play in the acquisition of cultural literacy.  Citing language research with memory, George Miller’s work on short-term memory is mentioned. Jacqueline Sachs’ 1967 research showing the “original form of a sentence is rapidly lost to memory, whereas an accurate memory for its meaning is retained” (37). Hirsch’s experiments with Richmond college students is shared, using a paragraph about Grant and Lee, and another on friendship, with graphed and charted results tabulating original and degraded texts, illustrating the differences between comprehension of original and degraded texts; however the results were muddied by the greater evidence of background knowledge as the greater obstacle to understanding. These experiments are the ones that changed Hirsch’s career towards pedagogic reform, providing the results showing the importance of background information to fill in the gaps in the texts. Younger children and their associations with memory and words are studied, also illustrating the use of schemata. This leads Hirsch to say, “But literacy requires us to have both intensive knowledge of relationships and extensive knowledge of specifics” (59), one argument against the Rousseau/Dewey model of content-neutral instruction. The last research models show Krauss and Glucksberg’s  Social and Nonsocial Speech, studying the interaction between language and symbols, and how older subjects are able to use language to describe symbols that smaller children are not. The argument for the background experience of literacy as a reference for the interpretation of symbols is clearly stated.

Hirsch Jr. explores national languages and how their formal structures came about to support the need for maintaining formal written Standard English as part of our cultural literacy. Following  national academies and language agencies created to standardize usage, Hirsch maintains that standardization is a nationalistic responsibility that solidifies and strengthens a country’s abilities as a world player. Standardization also supports industry and commerce, legitimizing them. Hirsch Jr. presents his concept of “vocabulary”, stating that “Our national vocabulary has three distinct domains. The first is international…Lying beyond the core is the sphere of vocabulary needed for literacy in English, no matter in what country the language is used…But in addition to broadly shared, international spheres of knowledge, every literate person today has to possess information and vocabulary that is special to his or her own country” (75). He describes French, Spanish and English standardization processes historically, with arbitrariness and differences from oral dialects, finishing with, “…every national language is a conscious construct that transcends any particular dialect, region or social class” (82). Culture is similarly constructed, pulling together materials that are deemed of relevance to population cohesion. “For nation builders, fixing the vocabulary of a national culture is analogous to fixing a standard grammar, spelling and pronunciation” (84). The example of a Scotsman, Hugh Blair, who wrote Rhetoric in 1762, is used to show how standardization can be produced by someone from outside the culture. This leads Hirsch Jr. to the examination of American culture-creators such as Mason Weems, who helped forge the cultural myth behind George Washington and the apple tree to help make him more accessible and less intimidating. Other great Americans have been subject to myth-making and legend-creations. Interestingly, Hirsch Jr. points out that we Americans have bypassed bloody times caused by conflict when a national language was imposed by having inherited English (91). Hirsch finishes his discussion on national language and culture by noting that, “Toleration of diversity is at the root of our society, but encouragement of multilingualism is contrary to our traditions and extremely unrealistic”(93).

Hirsch Jr.’s interest in a national vocabulary helps establish common ground in a pluralist nation. He thinks of American culture and its vocabulary in three segments: at one end, civil religion, full of traditional meaning and values; the other end, neutral vocabulary used in public discourse, objective and empty of meaning; in the middle, the active, culture vocabulary. Hirsch Jr. believes the two outer ends hold remain stable and brook little discussion; the middle ground is where the cultural literacy knowledge is applied and shared in public discourse. It is to maintain the integrity of this middle ground that Hirsch is presenting a national vocabulary, like a dictionary, to help us navigate the parameters of shared discourse. To clarify his position, Hirsch tells of London in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how the many streams and kinds of people mixed to create the English of common parlance. He says, “Literate culture is far less exclusive, for instance, than any ethnic culture, not matter how poverty-bound, or pop culture, or youth culture”(106).

Hirsch Jr. ends with a critique of educational policies and curriculum, which he blames on “romantic formalism” (110).  He attacks the skills orientation of instruction, and acknowledges criticisms that family background impedes cultural literacy learning. He takes a look at two reports on education, the Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies (1893), and the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, (1918), and tracks how Dewey and Rousseau shaped curriculum and policy in their times. The Appendix: A Preliminary List by E.D. Hirsch Jr., Joseph Kett, and James Trefil, reviews suggestions on how to compile language, literature and scientific knowledge and content follows; this is followed by The List, 5,000 entries of topics needed to fulfill basic cultural literacy content. Notes and an index finish the book.

Critiques of Cultural Literacy

In looking at the critiques of E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s Cultural Literacy concept, we need to look at the discourse before its publication. Social sciences and humanist studies see the research on literacy from different perspectives. The social scientists such as Scribner and Cole and Heath bring in the social aspects involved in individual literacies, and have broadened their perspectives as a result. The humanists such as Eric Havelock and Walter Ong perceive a duality that is defined by orality and literacy, or the “Cognitive Divide”, where the mental attributes in cognitive development stemming from literacy are measurably different and of greater social and educational value. The humanist perspective, which sees no such connection to social variables in achieving literacy, has been aligned with secular schooling frameworks of expectations, bringing up the question: is the literacy they reference based on academic literacy? Coming from Western schooling? As Patricia Bizzell notes in “Arguing About Literacy” (1988,) in advocating Standard English as the solution to Black English test scores, “… does not recognize the existence of any literate abilities here because the students have not mastered the literate abilities that count for him namely those associated with academic literacy” (144). Hirsch’s The Philosophy of Composition has placed his thinking about writing along traditionalist lines and placed his focus on academic literacy.  Hirsch believes that instruction in formal written Standard English is the answer. As issues around the “Cognitive Divide” debate bring the factor of social context more into focus, Hirsch is grappling with the new evidence of prior knowledge and its impact on reading comprehension, and his ideas in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know are seen to some to be a “corrective” to the “Great Divide” (Bizzell 144).  He is now seen as in the social science camp, as it counters the “deficit” model of the humanists.  So, strong objections rest on the veiled dominant cultural reinforcements that this approach to literacy covers. His list seems prescriptive, and although he qualifies this with saying local input is necessary, it appears “his dream [is] for a national curriculum [that is] totalitarian, racist, sexist, and laden with social class prejudice” (Bizzell 146). Bizzell’s argument that Hirsch’s reliance on historical perspectives and references in the name of national identity represent the status quo, saying that somehow history has cemented these perspectives into rightness.  This is the entrance fee to being a part of the “public discourse”, to being considered literate, or is it academically literate?

Then there is the issue of exactly how a literate person becomes literate. Is it by sitting down and plowing through a list of topics? Thomas H. Estes, Carol J. Gutman, and Elise K. Harrison object to the idea of “transmission”, saying, “ By implying that [“list-knowing”] equals competence, he reverses the process of literacy acquisition knowing the list becomes the criterion for being literate rather than the result of being literate” (16). Others find the “list” approach to literacy too reminiscent of Dickensian days, when knowledge was funneled down students’ throats.

The question of how an individual builds the schemata to then retain the information is also left unanswered by Hirsch Jr., which makes his approach seems static and curiously lifeless, contributing to the sense that things have been reversed in his approach.  Wayne C. Booth, a personal friend to Hirsch Jr., writes an impassioned open letter to his friend, trying to explain the parts of his concept that need reconsideration:

 Everything that we experience, of course, carries with it what you call information, but no information is ever sucked in unless charged by some motivated experience. You rightly mock the effort of some “skills” enthusiasts to teach skills as broken-down units, skill by skill, on the mistaken assumption that skills are simply transferable, independent of what they are exercised on. Why do you not then acknowledge that teaching bits of deliberately superficial information will be subject to the same corruption: information that is picked up to satisfy factitious experiential demands, such as a threatening test, will seldom last beyond short-term memory; what sticks is what we can construct into a context, one that provides a reason for attending to it. (17)

Booth takes it one step further: “The truth is that nobody learns anything by being taught it unless by teaching we mean discovering how to turn passive indifference into an active grasping of some corner of the world’s riches” (18).

Stephen Tchudi in “Slogans Indeed: A Reply to Hirsch”, also finds the devil is in the details in Hirsch’s concept. The idea that background information does not include what the reader brings to the text, and does not entails making meaning through instruction is anathema; force-feeding and memorization are also counter-productive to teaching children. Tchudi challenges Hirsch’s contention that there was a period in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries when teaching literacy was smooth, productive and integrated into the curriculum. Most importantly, he emphasizes the role of context in creating  experiences for students that root their learning, and reminds Hirsch that learning language and acculturation is a natural process, not automatic (72-73).

Conclusion

In the 90s, when  talk about standards dominated, and studies such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the National Endowment for the Humanities were showing sliding literacy abilities by students, E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s concept had the reassuring ring of manageable results in educational reform. Certainly, the arc of his scholarly concerns showed his commitment to the intention of a text, and the need for a disinterested conveyor of meaning, i.e. the interpreter, who can objectively supply the meaning (Hitchens). This lines up nicely with being the conveyor of a clear path out of the wilderness of low cultural literacy, and Hirsch Jr. has steadfastly maintained his position through the years of foundation work on pedagogy and curriculum and a stream of books: the Core Knowledge Series, which starts with What Your Preschooler Needs to Know , and moves up the grades; The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (1996); The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children (2006) and most recently, The Making of Americans (2010). His rebuttals and articles stay on message. In prescribing a solution for the fourth grade slump in test scores in “Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge – of Words and the World” (2003),  Hirsch Jr. declares, “Decoding fluency is achieved through accurate initial instruction followed by lots of practice” (12). His simple solution for cultural literacy as well. This steady drumbeat has produced results. In addition to the Common Core State Standards being implemented widely in schools, and tied to the curriculum in the High School Equivalency (HSE) tests beginning in 2014, the Core Knowledge Series and curriculum generated by the Foundation have been very popular, particularly in charter schools. England is implementing a new approach to education said to be much influenced by Hirsch Jr. (Wikipedia). Professors such as Jeremiah Reedy consider the question of background knowledge to be an empirical question, answered by Hirsch empirically, and Reedy is interested in implementing a college-level cultural literacy list, which he has initiated in “Cultural Literacy for College Students” (2007).

Finally, in Al Baker’s New York Times article, “Culture Warrior, Gaining Ground: E. D. Hirsch Sees His Education Theories Taking Hold” (September 27, 2013)  E.D. Hirsch Jr., age 85, is lauded and credited with the current changes in educational reformn being carried out across the nation. “This is a redemptive moment for E. D. Hirsch, after a quarter-century of neglect by people both conservative and liberal,” said  Sol Stern, an education writer and senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.  It seems instructive in the efficacy of being tenacious to the end.

References

“E.D. Hirsch Jr.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 3 (Dec. 2013). Web.

Baker, Al. “Culture Warrior, Gaining Ground: E. D. Hirsch Sees His Education Theories Taking Hold”. The New York Times. (September 27, 2013).

Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing About Literacy.” College English. Vol. 50, No. 2. (Feb., 1988). Pp. 141-153.

Booth, Wayne C. “Cultural Literacy and Liberal Learning: An Open Letter to E.D. Hirsch Jr.” Change, Vol. 20, No. 4 . (Jul - Aug. 1988). pp 10-21.

Estes, Thomas H., Gutman, Carol J., and Harrison, Elise K. “Cultural Literacy: What Every Educator Needs to Know.” Educational Leadership. September 1988. pp. 14-17.

Hirsch Jr., E.D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Vintage Books, New York. May 1988.

Hitchens, Christopher. “Why We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know Just Ask E.D. Hirsch.” The New York Times Magazine. (May 13, 1990).

Krauss, R. M. and Glucksberg, S. “Social and Nonsocial Speech.” Scientific American, Inc. (1977). Pp. 65-67.

Reedy, Jeremiah. “Cultural Literacy for College Students.” Academic Questions Winter 2006-07. The National Association of Scholars. www.nas.org. Web.

Tchudi, Stephen. “Slogans Indeed: A Reply to Hirsch.” Educational  Leadership. (Dec . 1987 – Jan. 1988). pp. 72-73.

Final thoughts.

   The last fifteen weeks of learning have been rich and rewarding.  Besides comprehensive and fascinating travels through the development of the spoken and written word, and its differences, we have also delved into the significance of the advent of print and the printing press. I felt like I was looking at the back of a tidal wave, as it roared past me, arching monstrously over the landscape, pulling everything in its undertow up and into its enormous maw...stupefying. And what we looked at was only a glimpse...
   Other observations: As the printing press brought a revolution of simultaneous journeys inside one's own psyche and interiority, and outside to the world of man and mystery, we also gained the means to exponentially study, categorize, analyze, synthesize, dialogue, and experiment with every aspect of inner and outer life. Like population explosion.
   Now, we are at another juncture of enormity yawning in front of us: will we continue endlessly dissecting life down into its micro-micro elements? Will we learn to pull back and choose a different form of generalized synthesis, like a new, visual iconic language, divorced from academic, over-specialized language? Will something heretofore unimaginable develop organically, unexpectedly? Or will it all keep multiplying so endlessly the best an individual can do in the future will be to make a choice early on to participate in one of many gigantic umbrellas of language contexts, never able to traverse to the next umbrella, as the distance, linguistically, is too great? Or will we converge completely, learning how to have so many forms of linguistic approaches it will be like living in an enormous glass tower, with access to everything all around you at your fingertips? We are already somewhat there, aren't we?
   The challenges to educators who wish to open worlds for students through language, reading and writing are a little intimidating. Those too, have grown with light-speed, as the complexity of our society, our world, our lives is shaped by a shrinking world and an expanding consciousness of cultural and communal differences. How do we educators use our time and resources wisely? How do we stay abreast of the changes? What is my strategic approach to a digital and technological world that can barely keep up with its own changes? I feel, again, like I am asking myself to be a surfer on this enormous tsunami, and only extreme vigilance, flexibility, awareness and good balance will keep me from going under.
Looking at the last few decades in regards to literacy theory and its development as it has been practiced and promoted in its broadest sense, I am relieved to see that change is the order of the day; therefore it is not my responsibility to designate one or another approach or orientation as "the answer". There are no answers. Just exploration, experimentation with approaches, and a keen interest and attention to our students, their needs and an integration of what they bring to the table, to create an environment of meaningful learning for everyone.

Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library Visit

            Prof. Dutschke set out a banquet of selections for us to feast on when we visited the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library collection on November 11, 2013. In showing us a vast sweep of time and human development in the printed word, we understood how deep and wide this window into history is; how much more there is to this fascinating subject than can possibly be digested in a brief visit of touching, seeing and listening. Nevertheless, we gorged ourselves like early bird buffet eaters, trying to scarf down as much as we could of the visual, tactile, lingual and abstract offerings in our short time.

            For me, the selection was tantalizing in its physical evolution and composition, showing a range of beauty that was a doorway into a different way of life and thinking. This rich sensory stimulus threatened to overshadow a subtler component: the evolution of thought, and its representation on a two-dimensional surface. Both of these elements became intertwined in my appreciation of the experience.

            The physicality of the printed materials, most of them books, took me back to the great satisfaction I got as a child with books: holding them, feeling them, smelling them, turning the pages, journeying across its surfaces with my eyes. At the library, these pleasures were magnified: the touch of animal skin, the weight of their bindings, the tight lettering. These books seemed to demand a deeper devotion and attention, in their time, than what we give and receive from our books now. I considered how few people must have been able to touch these early versions of writing: one had to be specially educated or trained to use them.

           In the early phase examples, we saw early block, carved and handwritten letters in Greek and Egyptian stone or papyri illustrating oratory and legal needs; each painstakingly rendered. A sample of scriptura continua, beautiful and unbroken, looked difficult to read; it was meant to be spoken aloud, and was often delegated to slave scribes. Peering behind the letters, I imagined the reclining Greeks, eyes closed, listening intently as the orator filled the air with his reading, as they “relished the mellifluous metrical and accentual patterns of pronounced texts…” (Saenger 11).

            Hundreds of years later, reading had turned itself inside out. Whereas the ancients believed scripta manet, verba volat, where “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air”, designating a higher value to the spirit embodied in spoken language not found in unspoken words on a page, (Manguel  45),  by the 14^th and 15^th centuries, solitary, silent reading was a desirable pursuit attached to social graces and status. Touching the heavy leather and metal-bound press-printed book of hours owned privately by a Flemish woman, I could see her at home, alone, quietly turning pages by the light of a window, reading silently. In these times, it was even possible to buy “singletons”, which were additional desired pages with illustrations that were “tipped in”, meaning carefully cut and sliced into the binding of the book, enhancing its contents, and reflecting an individual’s desires, customized book-making.  In her person, she represented all the changes wrought over time: she was a private owner (a woman, no less) of the bulky and impressive book; she had the skills to decipher all the lettering, which had spaces, vowels, and embellishments to enhance and support her search for meaning; and the contents, religious texts, were available for her private and silent consideration.

            The Horn Book was a strange anomaly that looked so presumptively modern, many of us assumed the clear horn plastic window over the papyrus was plastic; the tiny metal screws reminded us of the hundreds of years since its creation. In a primer illustration, later, we saw a young person brandishing the horn book, showing its use for teaching the young. The Italian primer from the mid- 1500s showed a partial leaf of paper with bad writing repeating the phrase “when a teacher beats you it’s for your own good” three times, causing speculation that the writing had been a punishment assignment.

            Scribing, much of it religious, was the main form of writing before the printing press, and continued during the incunable phase between the 1450s until 1501. The reality of scribal life, concentrated on the exact and disciplined copying of letters, painstakingly rendered, line by line, made the end result bigger than simply words on a page; there was a hierarchy of skill and difficulty to scribing, with a knowledge of Greek of the highest value, connecting the scribe to ancient manuscripts. Seeing the tiny Latin words, perfectly lined up, written by hand, was particularly breathtaking in the German psalter from the mid-1300s, as each line began with a decorated capital letter, following to the end, then dropping off, with the next line starting another decorated capital of another line of psalm.

            The resistance to printing was strongest in Renaissance Italy, in spite of the pains taken to imitate the bound manuscripts of European 15^th C. (Bringhurst 41).   The printing press selections, ranging from the divine to the personal, with the encyclopedias and dictionaries to the medical recipes and primers for reading, gave evidence to the blossoming of function and form. The tangible change in texture from papyrus to linen or paper gave a glimpse into the wider access of the contents. People outside the church now possessed these modern tools of expression, and investing them with their own private meanings. More and more people could gain the skill and tools to learn to read and write, even though it was the more affluent and socially well-off; it was still a huge shift from the religious few in pre-Renaissance times.  An Italian book of medical recipes for a household when illness struck, the alphabetic primers in Latin, French and English, the encyclopedias and dictionaries that now allowed room on the page for illustrations, all addressed the more practical purposes that printed books now served.

            For me, the most staggering aspect of this branch of human development was the move from communal, oral use of the written word to the more elusive and profound symbiosis between reader and book: the beginning of internal, subjective dialogue made concrete through letters and words on a page.

                                   

Plimpton Hornbook No. 1, England, s. XVIII. Plimpton MS 258, England, s. XV third quarter, Primer.

Works Cited

Bringhurst, Robert and Chappell, Warren. A Short History of the Printed Word. Communication Arts 2000 vol. 42.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York .Viking Penguin.1997.

Saenger, Paul. Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California. 1997.

Digital Scriptorium. http://digital-scriptorium.org

A Consideration of Cognitive Divide Theory and its Implications

   Reading and writing are seen as basic necessities in advanced societies. If we compare First and Third World countries, the ability to read and write is considered a defining factor in their economic and social achievements.  Countries with populations lacking reading and writing skills are seen as functioning from a deficit, contributing to a lack of advancement, both within the country and internationally. While every country has literate and non-literate populations, the social and economic success, status, achievement and progress in that country is tied to the literate population. In First World countries, basic literacy is a necessity for a functioning workforce and is the first step towards the foundation of higher skills that promote competition and innovation, helping to secure the economy and general prosperity. Success in any country, industry, field, business or endeavor is tied to literacy capabilities, and international business, trade and governance rests on the literate class. While Third World countries function with large non-literate populations, their skills are limited to non-literate tasks, which limits the kinds of businesses that can grow and expand. These countries must provide literacy to at least a portion of the population in order to engage with First World countries economically, socially and politically. It is also understood that reading and writing, in helping to develop a skilled people, helps raises the standard of living, and provides more economic growth potential for a country. The changing status of previously Third World countries to more First World status is directly related to their abilities to create a literate, and therefore skilled, population. Basic literacy skills in a country become the pivot between progress and lack of it.

   This is why the division of a population between those that are literate and those that are non-literate is called the Great Divide, as “…highly literate societies and highly literate people appear to have economic, political, and social advantages over those who are not literate or not as literate...” (Wiley p.31).   This theory is also called the Cognitive Divide Theory, as the mental processes that are attributed to the development of literacy abilities are seen as a major factor in this division. As Reder and Davila (2005) state, “...there are fundamental and far-reaching cognitive differences between literate and non-literate societies and individuals” (p.170). The cognitive processes associated with literacy are seen as more analytic, critical and organizational,as the written word created deeper abilities for sorting, ascribing, detailing, delving and systematizing. Therefore, the division in the Cognitive Divide Theory is not only between the literate and non-literate, but also between the mental processes developed in each population.  

   The Cognitive Divide Theory developed in the 1960’s through a variety of disciplines and their studies. These disciplines ranged from the social sciences, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and history. Their connections to language and literacy brought more attention to these areas, influencing deeper subsequent studies. Anthropologists, historians and philosophers studying social norms brought literacy and its development more to the forefront, while social sciences and psychology focused on individuals and their connections to language and literacy.

   Notable society-focused studies included Claude Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (1962), which maintained that there is no intrinsic distinction between a “savage” mind and a “civilized” mind; Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963), about how Western civilization’s advancement changed drastically when the Greeks’ adapted an alphabetic writing system; Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962),  which presented cognitive development and organizational advancements as coming from the literate technologies (alphabetics, printing and electronics); and Jack Goody & Ian Watt’s The Consequences of Literacy (1963), bringing in the idea of a set of mental attributes tied to reading and writing, concluding that writing establishes a deeper form of ascribing meaning,  as well as the means to develop a depth of study of abstract subjects. As they saw it, “…[I]t is difficult to believe that such a large and complex series of arguments as are presented in The Republic, for instance, or in Aristotle’s Analytics, could possibly be created, or delivered, much less completely understood, in oral form” (p. 330). These studies of language helped to validate a perspective of a binary division in populations, promoting an orientation emphasizing the virtues of literacy, eclipsing the harder to uncover traits of non-literate peoples, creating an imbalanced outlook.

Subsequent individual-focused studies of literacy, like Patricia M. Greenfield’s Oral of Written Language: The Consequences for Cognitive Development in Africa, the United States and England (1972), that showed how oral language contexts and written language contexts in different cultural groups of Africa, England and the US connected to different educational approaches and  cognitive development; David R. Olson’s From Utterances to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing (1977), which examined the issues around meaning, comprehension, acquisition, reasoning and reading, bringing in a framework of “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” in order to study meaning more closely; and Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole’s  Literacy Without Schooling: Testing for Intellectual Effects (1978,) a study of the Vai people of Liberia who developed their own syllabic writing system and were literate without schooling. These studies brought in evidence challenging the Great Divide Theory with new, critical evidence.  

   As language studies began research into the acquisition and implementation of literacy, the assumptions about a cognitive set of skills stemming from literacy as being more advanced came into question.  The daily use of language was examined, as opposed to the history of linguistics , and some of the evidence was at odds. As these studies brought in more complex pictures with mixed evidence, the perspective of the Cognitive Divide Theory began to appear simplistic, resulting from a more dominant culture perspective, the First World.

   There was also debate and complexity around the question of cognitive development itself. Factors such as schooling made things complicated to track and separate when studying the effects of reading and writing on individuals and societies and how it relates to mental development. Could literacy be an effect of schooling in general? If so, is school also responsible for the cognitive skills associated with literacy? Does cognitive development come from understanding an alphabetic system? These questions were investigated by scholars from a variety of disciplines, exploring these questions.  Shirley Brice Heath’s study, What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School (1982) brought in a multi-faceted perspective on forms of literacy, its acquisition, accommodation, and definition. In three distinct communities, Heath tracked parents and their children and how literacy was introduced into their lives before schooling, and what the effects were when they began school; she questioned the efficacy of separating reading activities into skills and activities removed from the communities the children come from. A rich array of oral and literate practices were revealed, shining a light on the language inter-relatedness between literacy and community values and beliefs.

   Three perspectives on literacy acquisition that have contributed to the debate on the Cognitive Divide Theory are: the autonomous model of literacy, which sees literacy as a set of formal skills such as decoding and encoding, that is individually acquired, allowing an individual to master the demands of reading and writing; the ideological model, which looks more closely at the political underpinnings of the learning experience, and asks how the particular setting and power structures involved contribute to the acquisition of literacy (Street 1984). The social practices model, which presents the social context and its demands as dictating the terms by which literacy is acquired. There is also critical literacy, similar to the ideological, which brings in a more assertive role in pedagogy, demanding that the context of the power structure be brought into learning and confronted in order to move forward (Papen p.10).  Each of these has a particular perspective not only on literacy acquisition, but also on how cognitive skills such as analysis and logic are tied to literacy.

The autonomous orientation is associated with Goody and Watt and the “pastness of the past”, linking objectivity to the acquisition of specific literacy skills. The scholar Walter Ong has contributed to this model as well, as his research of oral societies shows how mnemonics and memory perpetuates social needs, keeping a narrativized, indistinct relation to thought, promoting easier social equilibrium (Ong p.20); the changes in thought brought on by literate societies allows for detachment, distinctions, an adherence to linear time referencing, abstractions and intellectual exploration (Ong p. 26). Goody’s study of lists as facets of cognitive development, enabling classification and deeper memory, illustrates how in earlier times “the list…utilized as a teaching device as well as an instrument of learning, so that every schoolchild...learns where he should place ‘dew’ in relation to heaven and earth” (Goody p. 47). Both these scholars supported the idea that the cognitive development from literacy was of a different order from orality, giving credence and validity to the autonomous approach, tracing literacy to a specific set of skills that can be objectively acquired, developed and utilized, separate from social or cultural contexts.

Paul Gee and Brian Street are two scholars associated with the ideological and social practices orientation that is critical of the Cognitive Divide Theory. Both identify a dominant social criteria in the theory, where claims of cognitive benefits of literacy “privilege one social group’s ways of doing things as if they were natural and universal.” (Gee p.731).  Brian Street says, “The autonomous approach is simply imposing western conceptions of literacy on to other cultures or within a country those of one class or cultural group onto others.” (p. 2)

Critical literacy, defined by Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, whose aim of not only ‘reading the word’ but also ‘reading the world’, stresses understanding the power structures underlying society and how to transform them, is embodied by New Literacies Studies. This approach looks at how society influences and wields power and oppression; social justice and emancipation are pedagogical aims (Papen p.11).  This is in opposition to functional or basic literacy, which “emphasizes the individual and their literacy deficits as the underlying problem.” (Papen p.10).

   Social practices theory, focusing on the social applications of literacy learning, emphasizes the uses of these practices in specific, social settings (Wiley p.33).  Shirley Brice Heath, Street and Scribner and Cole emphasize the need to bring in the setting, its power structure and influence, and the cultural values of the population before a comprehensive approach to the study of literacy and the implementation of literacy acquisition can progress.  Scribner and Cole (1978) concluded the great divide between the cognitive development of oral and literate cultures was really an analysis of specific tasks; the aspect of schooling interfered with fully understanding literacy outcomes.

   There is much debate as to the merits of a school system and its pedagogical approach to literacy. Ideologically oriented scholars such as McDermott (1987a 1987b) maintain that “schools have become a socially sanctioned mechanism that ascribes a lower status to [the students].” In response, Erickson (1984) has held that “literacy not only promotes prestige of the literate but also promotes strategic power for them, because it involves mastery of a communication system” (Wiley p.47). Yet Erickson also concludes, “From a sociocultural point of view, literacy, reasoning and civility as daily school practices cannot be associated or reordered apart from the fabric of society in which those practices take place” (Erickson 1984 pp. 543-544).

It seems the Cognitive Divide Theory, initially illuminating the need to bring literacy to non-literate populations in order to increase their social and economical opportunities, also brought in a host of assumptions and generalizations that now no longer serves to promotes social well-being through education as once believed, as they inflict the dominant, First World culture perspective on an increasingly multi-lingual, multi-cultural blendings of populations. These populations have their own traditions that are not so easily understood or utilized, but which need to be integrated in order for a full literate potential to be realized. The currently expanding discourse on literacy acquisition continues to shift and change, with a growing understanding that we are in the midst of a transition, where the simplistic, binary perspectives that functioned in the 60s and 70s is no longer applicable. Further research and expansion is necessary.

Works Cited:

Brice Heath, Shirley. “What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School.” Language in Society, Volume 11, Issue 01. Cambridge University Press. (April 1982) pp 49-76.

Gee, J. P. “Orality and Literacy: From the Savage Mind to Ways With Words.” TESOL Quarterly, 20: (1986) pp. 719–746.

Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Apr., 1963) pp. 304-345

Greenfield, Patricia M. “Oral of Written Language: The Consequences for Cognitive Development in Africa, the United States.” Language and Speech, April 1972 vol. 15 no. 2 169-178

Harvard Educational Review, 47, 3. (1977) pp. 257-81.

Olson, David R. “From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing.”

Reder, Stephen and Davila, Erica. “Context and Literacy Practices.”  Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2005) 25, pp. 170–187.

Scribner, Sylvia and Cole, Michael. “Literacy without Schooling: Testing for Intellectual Effects.” Harvard Educational Review, v48 n4 (1978) pp. 448-61.

Street, Brian.  “Autonomous and Ideological Models of Literacy: approaches from New Literacy Studies.” www.media-anthropology.net/street_newliteracy.pdf. King’s College, London.

Wiley, Terence G. Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States. Center for Applied Linguistics. 2005.