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Cultural Literacy, What Every American Needs to Know
Catalog No. 0394758439
This book is not the same as the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Rather the topics and definitions, this book is a discussion of the bigger picture: the decline of, the need for, and the road back to cultural literacy. Newsweek said of it: "In this forceful manifesto Prof. Hirsch argues that children in the U.S. are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. They lack cultural literacy: a grasp of background information that writers and speakers assume their audience already has. Thus, even if a student has a basic competence in the English language, he or she has little chance of entering the American mainstream without knowing what a silicon chip is, or when the Civil War was fought." Okay, now as homeschooling parents Hirsch's book does more than lament and exhort: it tells exactly what the basics are and exactly why it's necessary to get back to them."
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