Dictionaries without Ideology (flash movie)

[25] Once we begin to understand the impulse behind the creation of encyclopedias, we are ready to understand why E.D. Hirsch begins his prescriptions for the reformation of American education with a list that becomes a dictionary, which is in fact an encyclopedia.5 His list reflects how Hirsch imagines literacy from within his own interiorized map of knowledge, a map based on what he has learned and values. What follows is not a comprehensive critique of Hirsch's claims; the reaction to his book has been intense enough to provide many analyses which, when taken together, do an adequate job of covering that territory.6 Robert Scholes has called Hirsch's proposals "voodoo education,"7 and while I do not entirely disagree with the implications of that accusation, I also find myself in agreement with Patrick Scott, who finds Hirsch's central thesis fascinating and who considers the profession's negative response to Hirsch intellectually shortsighted and politically inept. One of the most interesting and thoughtful critics is a former student, Gregory G. Colomb, whose summary takes his professor very seriously indeed.

[26] Hirsch's main claim is that the current educational "crisis" can be traced to specific pedagogical errors based on the flawed philosophies of Rousseau and Dewey. American public schools have concentrated on developing skills in isolation from "facts." This has lead to cultural illiteracy. Educational failure results from the lack of a common vocabulary rooted in a common cultural matrix. Without this common vocabulary, comprehension is limited. Hirsch posits an ideal reader, or rather, he accurately describes how texts are written with an ideal reader in mind. Those who possess this vocabulary are culturally literate; those who do not are crippled. He defines cultural literacy 8 vaguely as: possessing "the basic information needed to thrive in the world (Cultural Literacy xii)" or

. . .the network of information that all competent readers possess. It is the background information, stored in their minds, that enables them to take up a newspaper and read it with an adequate level of comprehension, getting the point, grasping the implications, relating what they read to the unstated context which alone gives meaning to what they read. (2)

[27] Hirsch's notions appeal to nationalists who imagine America as a coherent entity; an entire chapter is devoted to the relationship between common cultural knowledge and the development of the modern nation-state. Clearly, his imaginings of literacy rely on his interiorized map of knowledge and are tied to a classic dream of progress and unity outside of religion or specific politics. Hirsch sincerely dreams of escaping factionalism through the construction of common knowledge. Unfortunately, he seeks to diminish uncommon knowledge in order to accomplish this goal. His method for canonizing the vocabulary of cultural literacy rests on his own experience as an intellectual and as a participating member of a particular body politic.

[28] Hirsch believes the politics of the American educational system is such that a unitary national curriculum is an impossibility. Such a curriculum could foster a common vocabulary, but Hirsch believes it would never be adopted. For this reason, he invents the idea of a list of What Every American Needs to Know. This list, which appears at the end of the 1987 book, immediately becomes a singular media curiosity and a major point of political dissension.

[29] The list is gleaned from the vocabulary contained in a body of classical works represented by the canon of great books, including the Bible, Shakespeare and key cultural documents like the Declaration of Independence. The vocabulary included in these works forms the stable core of Hirsch's list. As to the elements of this list which change, Hirsch has decided that “. . .The persistent, stable elements belong at the core(Hirsch, 1988, 29. In other words, all elements of the culture which are not part of this canonical vocabulary are peripheral. This banishment of cultural diversity and change has marked Hirsch's work as inherently hostile to progressive and radical social change. The notion of a dynamic culture is consistently given only lip service in his analysis. Nowhere in Hirsch's discussions does he seriously address this crucial observation: culture is dynamic.

[30] One wonders if he has looked around lately. Hirsch does not see American culture as a melange or salad or bouillabaisse as others have; he does not even imagine it to be a melting pot. Instead, "local, regional, ethnic" cultures are somehow severed from "mainstream culture (Cultural Literacy 22)." Terms from "local" cultures enter cultural literacy as accessories after the fact.

[31] It is Hirsch's easy erasure of the knowledges of "local" cultures that has given him the most clout with conservatives. And it is this erasure that has caused him the most trouble with those who are conscious of living in a world Hirsch refuses to acknowledge, a world in which the many cultures of the planet are colliding with increasing frequency. A world which is at once cacophonous and filled with lovely harmonies. The response to Hirsch's program has lead to the publication of alternative lists which take this reality into consideration. In 1988, the Graywolf Press answered both Hirsch and Bloom by publishing Multicultural Literacy: Opening the American Mind. Thirteen essays described the ground of our culture as already multicultural. The collection's appendix began to list items not included in Hirsch's list that are commonly omitted from U.S. educational texts, political thinking or social planning. It begins with the 100,000 Songs of Milarepa and ends with Zulu. Similarly in 1997, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Anthony Appiah and Michael Colin Vasquez produced The Dictionary of Global Culture which takes as its premise that the West cannot remain the cultural and intellectual center of the world, that Europeans and North American know too little about world history and culture, that "European culture is increasingly influenced by American popular culture; and the true roots of the culture of the United States run deep in the soils of many continents," that Western culture risks becoming (remaining) parochial and narrow, that "we have lost that peculiar sense of wonder about the world and its diversity that characterized the European Renaissance and Enlightenment." The central focus of this work is not North American cultural literacy, but global literacy resting on common knowledge among the literate citizens of the world. Global Literacy attempts to gather together "the common knowledge essential for the creation of an international culture, in which the Western tradition is seen as one strand in a complexly woven tapestry of cultures."9 It is not surprising to note that not only do the editors of Global Culture make explicit the methods they used to compile their list, they remark that the cultural experts they consulted surprised them with lists that did not conform to their own biases and that they structured their methodology to elicit these surprises. Further, they warn their readers that no book, no encyclopedia, no dictionary could not be comprehensive or exhaustive and that the most complete dictionary would not suffice, that you need to know much more: the grammar of a language, how to read its poetry, how objects and ideas fit together in the lives of the people whose ideas and objects they are. And finally they warn: “A dictionary can never represent the whole range of culture, just because a culture is a whole as well as a collection of parts(xiii).

[32] All dictionaries and encyclopedias must be flawed, but this should not concern us unless we look to them for what they cannot supply. The idea that the list can be neutral and comprehensive is the real problem. "The evidence is increasingly clear: skills cannot be learned apart from knowledge (Columb 413)." Reading comprehension is rooted in world knowledge and many do lack this knowledge. Colomb exhaustively describes recent reading research, including artificial intelligence research, as does Eco in his discussion of encyclopedias. Colomb's conclusion:

The knowledge needed for reading and writing is more complex than any list or even network of propositions and. . .literate persons are vague about their knowledge because producing isolated propositions is a poor way to access that knowledge. (420)

Many other studies suggest that the knowledge that counts most is richly organized and hierarchical -- organized by plans and goals, organized into scenarios, organized by being understood and so connected to everything else we know. . .it is not enough for readers to know the requisite facts: they must understand them. (Colomb 424)

[33] The encyclopedic list mirrors a long Western intellectual tradition that imagines knowledge as an artifact which can be represented concretely (and therefore collected) and tested empirically. It is widely accepted that it is possible to possess a fund of knowledge comprised of discrete elements which then becomes enabling to the individual who deploys this knowledge in the material world. This is clearly the assumption behind the development of curricula composed of a number of subjects organized by discipline and then further organized by topics and sub-topics. The idea that what humans know can be organized and transmitted in an organized set is contradicted by Eco's claim that the semiosis of human culture cannot be globally collected. All such attempts result in an ideological bias because the universe of human knowledge cannot be represented as a totality; every attempt to codify local knowledges as "unique and 'global' -- ignoring their partiality -- produces an ideological bias (83-84)."

[34] The attempt to codify one local knowledge, European American cultural tradition, ignores the partiality of that vision and structurally produces a bias. There is nothing intrinsically negative about local knowledges; it is just that they are rooted in a perspective. It is their presentation as unique and global that produces the problem. Instead, they should be presented as tentative visions from a particular perspective. Gates' global literacy project attempts to address this issue by placing the Western tradition in context as "one strand in a complexly woven tapestry of cultures." As it addresses one problem, it presents another: it imagines it can make a global description by exiting the Manneristic maze and providing a bird's eye view. But Eco points out that a bird's eye view is only possible as a postulate. In practice, meaning is made by groping one's way in semi-blindness through a maze, a net, a rhizome. Learning to tolerate that semi-blindness is one skill we all need to cultivate.

[35] Eco would insist that comprehension of any lexical item on Hirsch's list demands deep knowledge. So the encyclopedic list necessarily fails because it attempts a global representation of what cannot be globally represented and because it assumes that exposure to individual lexical items can produce sufficient comprehension to be of use. It assumes that vocabulary knowledge can be fostered outside of deep contextualization.

[36] Eco, Colomb and I are positing cultural literacy as requiring a kind of omnivorous search for the connections between elements, between seemingly disparate nuggets and disciplines. From Diderot's project forward, encyclopedias have attempted to do just that. But individuals require mental maps rooted in their experience in order to interpret encyclopedic entries. Such maps are only temporary postulates which are necessarily myopic, rooted in the particular experiences and locations of the individual which necessarily change over time. Comprehension of the universe of human knowledge requires factual knowledge rooted in mental maps, which are themselves rooted in experience. All understanding is hypothesis and subject to change because these maps must change as experience changes. Comprehension also requires the ability to travel between many local knowledges as someone who not only observes but participates as a responsible member of a community, someone who is at once citizen, traveler and spy.

[37] Donna Haraway's notion of situated knowledges and Nancy Hartsock's notion of "standpoint" are useful analogs of this observation. "Standpoint" represents an achieved wisdom which is the result of struggle and engagement with oppressive material and social conditions. Hartsock claims "that there are some perspectives on society from which, however well-intentioned one may be, the real relations of humans with each other and with the natural world are not visible (159)." Hartsock considers

. . .the ruling group's vision [to be] both perverse [and partial] and made real by means of that group's power to define the terms for the community as a whole. . .the worker as well as the capitalist engages in the purchase and sale of commodities, and if material life structures consciousness, this cannot fail to have an affect. (162)

[38] It behooves us to examine the motivations which move individuals to curiosity and to commonality, to examine what motivates them to travel through the rhizome of human semiosis, how they negotiate alternate standpoints and situated knowledges. Literacy requires not the list, but its opposite, collation and re-collation across communities of knowledge. This vision of literacy does not make a simplistic division between skills and facts, a division underlying Hirsch's analysis. It recognizes that within a rhizome "thinking means to grope one's way," making connections. Making connections is precisely the point. Remember.

The main feature of a net is that every point can be connected with every other point, and where the connections are not yet designed, they are, however, conceivable and designable. A net is an unlimited territory. (81)

We need also to stop pretending to teach common readers and to face up to what students know perfectly well: that to move easily from one community of knowledge to another, from one discipline to another, requires not only a lot of knowledge but also the skills of an ethnographer and the flexibility of a spy. We could do a great deal toward creating a new kind of common reader by foregrounding for students the differences between communities of knowledge, by being explicit about the communal basis of our knowledge, and by helping them to understand the process of joining a community of knowers. (Colomb 461)

[39] The paradox of dictionaries and encyclopedias is that they are created by insiders in the know for others who may have great difficultly using them to advantage. Without a map, the list is sometimes worse than useless.

[40] Personally, I find Hirsch's dictionaries, in fact nearly all reference books, fascinating and fun. One reason for this is the fact that I have developed numerous overlapping maps of local knowledges. But I can vividly remember how baffling dictionaries were when I was a child, and they are sometime so even today when I find myself reading beyond my areas of expertise and/or familiarity. The process of reading definitions is often fruitless under those circumstances; I must encounter the same word over and over again in context before the dictionary definition comes alive with meaning. There is nothing mysterious or new about this observation, so why is it not accounted for in our pedagogies?

[41] The semiotics of dictionaries and encyclopedias predict that any list is not only trapped in ideology, not the worst thing that ever happened, but that lists in themselves obscure understanding.

[42] The plenitude of the encyclopedic project obscures its repressions. Dictionaries create narratives out of de-selection. Plenitude is illusory in such a system. All of these products record the ideologies of their creators. Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes have described how definitions are created by bifurcations created out of a lack. If everything was included in any map, it would, of course, be unreadable.

[43] Definitions must be constructed out of exclusion. For example, things may either move or not move. If they move, they may be dangerous or not. If they are dangerous, they may be human or not, and so on (Eco 80).

[44] All hierarchies proceed on this basis, in terms of something ruled out, in terms of a systematic denial of some attribute. The unconscious of the text is created by this repression and out of these lacks. Dictionaries necessarily construct a map of nation by means of systems of exclusion. It behooves the 'philosophers of the encyclopedia' to be aware of this process.

[45] Hirsch’s encyclopedic lists imply plenitude, but this implication is quickly contradicted by its gaps, many of which are inexplicable. By what logic is Jerry Falwell's entry longer than Jesse Jackson's? And both are accorded more space than Jim Crow and the John Birch Society, which are listed in immediate succession without correlation or reference to the Birch Society's racism. Hank Aaron's entry in the history section does not mention he was black or the anger that arose after he broke Babe Ruth's record. Jerusalem appears twice but is listed in the index only once -- under the world geography section. The cross references between Jerusalem as religious icon and modern city are absent, despite their critical relationship and even though both entries contain, in part, identical phrases. Without context, unforgivable gaps appear. Those who rely on the dictionary for literacy will certainly acquire a crippled literacy.

[46] Neither do this dictionary's sections (one easy indication we are not consulting a dictionary but rather an encyclopedia is the presence of these sections) follow a discernable logic. They are hierarchical, but this hierarchy does not offer the virtue of illumination. The eighteenth century encyclopedia imagined a synchronic world, but Hirsch's twenty-three sections clank awkwardly through an apparent diachronic progression. Religious and language based roots lead to world and national history and geography, to the social sciences, to business and economics, to the physical sciences and technology. Implicit in this progression is a theory of emergent humanism.

[47] Because Hirsch insists that an enormous number of vocabulary items in our popular reading refer to the Bible, Shakespeare, classical mythology and folklore, the sections, "The Bible" and "Mythology and Folklore" appear first, but they comprise only eight of 546 pages. Jerry Falwell, et. al., could have easily loaned space to Shakespeare whose entry is not nearly as contextualized as it needs to be. The dictionary inexplicably violates its own stated ideology by devoting less attention to key cultural markers. And in a curious echo of the Jim Crow and John Birch Society entries, Shakespeare is followed immediately by a separate entry discussing Shall I Compare thee to a Summer's Day? half as long as the Shakespeare entry itself. No cross references to other Shakespeare related entries are provided. How could any cultural illiterate wade through this series of deflections with any hope of coming out the wiser?

[48] Politically powerful interests, represented by individuals like William Bennett, Alan Bloom, Saul Bellow,10 Diane Ravitch, and Lynne Chenney, actively write, speak and lobby against multiculturalism and for mono-culturalism. One wonders if this discourse can sustain itself in the face of an extended struggle with ideologies represented by, for example, the Taliban. If Western civilzation’s most dangerous enemy is mono-cultural, can the an analogous position sustain itself within Western civilization? While fostering a mono-cultural image of literacy, these same interests support national achievement testing. Such testing will almost certainly be based on the encyclopedic list as a model of knowledge. The inertia of already developed tests will enforce a static list and a static curriculum. How could it be otherwise?11

[49] Lists are implicit in most of primary and secondary curricula as second only to skills. Students do not engage with these isolated bits. They do not remember the vocabulary. Memorizing isolated bits is what much of school is still about. Forgetting the list may be still more intrinsic to schooling. Because curricula do not foster strong mental maps, students cannot make sense out of the nonsense of lists.