Literacy and Mythocracy - a Response to Hirsch's Paper

Hirsch's argument on cultural literacy is very up-to-the-point in many different ways. I will focus on the paradoxical and contradictory nature of some of his remarks, as far as I have understood them; I would argue that it is precisely the paradox and contradiction of the text that make it valuable to understand what is at stake talking of literacy and society nowadays, in the States and beyond.

What Hirsch intends for cultural literacy is, in my opinion, nothing more than the concrete outpour/contemporary version of a mythical identification, something that the writer really longs for his society, and something that he feels the States lack. His continuous references to a common and shared background on which people would not really need to have a precise grasp, but that in some ways should pave and direct their understanding of society and of social goals, suggest that the role he envisages for the literate person is that of actor in a reality which has a somewhat accidental bias, directed only by some sort of universal commonsense which would only benefit from a shared set of symbols and values. Therefore, the access and the internalization of those values are what allow every individual to take part in the life of his or her society – which is quite obvious. In the case of a literate society, the ability to read or discuss topics linked to a written practice, and the means to decode these topics from a cultural perspective, are directly linked to the access of the individual to self-determination and self-assertiveness.

The problem arises when discussions on what should characterize this cultural (I would call it mythical) literacy come along. I think that Hirsch's instances of mythical sense-making practices are completely inconsistent with the standpoint from which he writes – that of an “out-of-many-one” scholar: traditional societies in which oral or written practices allow to maintain a shared cultural background avoiding much debate are societies that have not been built upon colonial and oppressive practices while simultaneously developing high levels of literacy and analytical sense. The idea of providing the States with a cultural literacy which is not controversial and highly debatable is simply absurd, as it is confirmed, in my opinion, with the reference to The Black Panther journal – I guess that, if asked what to add in a history or philosopical curriculum for the schools, the folks of The Black Panther would have suggested to study the premises and implications of slavery besides the Declaration of Independence. Not to talk about indigenous people, who maybe would have liked to have a go in respect to ideas of what Hirsch defines as “thriving creature” (31). Hirsch is correct in observing that “there is a pressing need for clarity about our educational priorities,” (25) indeed the core of the question is precisely there. What is education meant for? Challenge of the status quo? Well, if so, the mythical discourse of the States (as well as that of many other state-nations) should develop around imbalanced power, race, and class relations, which have lead to imbalanced distribution of richness and of access to resources and decision-making to produce richness, and I guess that in that case students would feel so much involved and challenged by the relevance of the notions and concepts they are studying, that there would be no risk of cultural illiteracy at all (maybe young people tend to forget the dates of the Reconstruction because it is not very clear to them how this superficial factual knowledge could in anyway affect their lives or toughts... which is telling on how our generations have been largely educated with de-contextualized , or "de-narrativized"and therefore useless notions).

I have the feeling that every literary, historical, maybe even geographical canon is the result of more or less conscious ideological practices, and this has become more and more evident with the democratization of the access to literacy. There is no accident, as Hirsch seems to imply, in the process of mythicization of the symbols which characterize a society; varying from society to society, in space and time (and in the dimension of the society), the myths are created, replicated, or destroyed according to the needs of the society itself, and the more complex (big, numerous, multi-mythical) the society, more complex and controversial it is to define its myths– or, in our case, its discursive structures or a cultural literacies. It seems to me that choosing one out of many may just serve the purpose of making infinite debates arise as a consequence ; which yet is useful, as the scholar and academic debate within the States already contains in itself the seed of a possible mythocracy for the country.