Cutural (Il)literacy?

There has been much talk lately about what students do and do not know before they attend college, when they graduate college, and what they have actually learned. The following is the first foray into this book length topic. And there are quite a few books on this.

Today’s blog is actually taken from a reply to a question from College Confidential. This site is much like Facebook for neurotic parents and over stressed ivy seeking kids: College Confidential. There are plenty of smart people who lurk and contribute. A Lot of drivel too. But it is a good resource as long as you are suspicious and never take a single person’s view as fact and the end of a question.

As the article in the most recent The Atlantic Magazine from a Harvard grad demonstrates, it is possible to go through the most prestigious school in the US without reading anything ED Hirsch would file under Cultural Literacy.
It is possible, to put it bluntly, for an English major to go through 4 years with reading perhaps only one (and in some cases none) of Shakespeare's plays.

Ibsen is a stretch it seems to me. Maybe Green Day for social commentary or perhaps Jersey Shore for anthropological treasures. But Ibsen is long dead and largely forgotten these days. Not for a theatre major but a liberal arts major will not have had to go near that particular dead white male and that goes for almost all the great books. That died in all but a few places a while ago.

Again, I am not the bearer of this news; it is the professors themselves who have been saying this for quite some time. Lionel Trilling, in The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent, sounded the death knell a generation before these kids were even born. So too Dwight MacDonald. The list of current diatribes against, what an Emory professor calls The Dumbest Generation, is persuasive.

I don't agree about the dumb part though. They are educated in ways those of us used to traditional education can barely dream of. As Adbusters so eloquently put it in a note to teachers, the average student is exposed to over 3500 ads a day. They are PhDs in advertising by the time they are 5.

On the other hand, I have met students in China who have read Joyce's Ulysses , or Italo Calvino, and most surprising to me, E.M. Cioran, all heroes to me, but hardly household names. In classes I know students are reading Bolano's epic 2066, or reading one of the great novels in American history, Infinite Jest. But Ibsen. Not likely. I do not mean this as a critique just an observation.

I will end this with something Douglas Day, a national book award winner and a phenomenal teacher once shared. "It is getting to the point that I feel I have to provide a footnote to everything I refer to. 'Jesus, once thought to be the Savior, thought to have lived in and around Jerusalem, which is a city in the Middle East.'" Of course he was being ironic, but with students coming in from all over the world, and with an academic free for all in college, I cannot be sure just what any student has read.