“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. Doctorow
Cultural Literacy refers to the shared basic knowledge of our society that facilitates our participation within it. That, as I engage with you, I am able to make certain assumptions about what you and I both know; for instance, if I say that “62 percent of Americans believe that the federal government should guarantee that everyone in the country has access to health care” (and this is true, by the way), I am assuming that you understand percentages, and that you know what the federal government is.
You might be saying to yourself, “well, of course I know that,” almost everyone does. This is cultural literacy. The question becomes, “what else should we all know and how should we learn it?” An answer was attempted in the late 1980s by the Core Knowledge Foundation who published a guide, The Core Knowledge Sequence.
In this CK Sequence, for each grade, kindergarten through eighth grade, students and teachers are provided “content guidelines” for mathematics, science, music, visual arts, language arts, history, civics, and geography. In my time working within a CK school that adopted this “curriculum,” I was charged with implementing the guidelines from the history, civics, geography, and language arts guidelines.
One of the criticisms of this approach to learning is that these guidelines were essentially lists of those things we should be familiar with and the manner of doing this was simply the rote memorization of facts; the bane of history students everywhere.
Simply memorizing is no way to learn history. However, many facts—including the key people, places, events, dates, and ideas within a history lesson—are often critically necessary to comprehend whatever larger meaning a story of past events might convey.
For instance, in order to fully comprehend the importance of the American Civil War, one should be able to identify its key players and know that it occurred in the 1860s; know that the primary tools for battlefield surgeons were saws; know that the name of the seceding states was the Confederacy, know the general meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation, and so on. These facts become the language of exploring the larger significance of the Civil War and how it might inform current discussions of, say, racial strife, political differences, the Constitution, technological advance, and more.
This is what it means to be culturally literate. As in, when I mention “Abraham Lincoln,” it is not necessary for me to explain who he is; that, there is a sense of Lincoln-ness that all Americans should understand. The same can be said of “Vietnam War” and “Franklin Roosevelt” and the “Mississippi River.” Upon hearing these things in conversation with friends and family or in digesting modern media, culturally literate people are able to express a sense of what these things are, thereby facilitating progress in the modern exchange of ideas. It is not necessary to understand all there is to know about Vietnam or FDR, but when I make reference to these elements of cultural literacy, I’m going to assume you understand that—among other things depending upon the context of our conversation—that the Vietnam War was unpopular, many protests were carried out against it and, despite massive military strength, the US withdrew in disgrace.
It is not necessary to know all facts; it is simply that some facts, ideas, and phrases are essential if we are going to successfully communicate with one another.
While there continues to be some discussion as to what exactly is essential and what is not—and the CK Foundation has debated this for decades—I believe that a culturally literate population is a healthy one.
Granted, there are many among us who might come across a reference to “Vietnam War,” or “Huckleberry Finn,” or “1776,” and nothing comes to mind. This is the tragic truth of our times: It is the culturally illiterate today who are most susceptible to those who would distort our past for nefarious reasons. While we are all free to interpret and filter current events through our own beliefs and experiences, it is imperative within our society that we at least be familiar with the cultural “language” that underscores the issues at hand. To me, cultural literacy is the hard work of democracy, a responsibility of citizenship, and should be a pillar of our public education system.
I think of this now after coming across a rather significant modern writer of whom I knew little. The March (2005) by E.L. Doctorow was on display as a library “staff favorite.” I had heard the name many times, perhaps in a crossword puzzle or on Jeopardy; and yet, until I picked up that book, I could not have told you a thing about him.
As it turns out, the historical fiction of E.L. Doctorow is regarded as some of the finest literature written during my lifetime… but you probably already knew that.
Alas, the cure for this inexcusable ignorance was to get to know the man. Over the past few weeks, I have done just that and now have a new-found sense of Doctorow-ness. Primarily, one of his gifts is the ability to explore the perspectives and inner thinking of common people as they struggle through the larger events of history.
Perhaps the best example I have come across so far is the randomly selected “staff favorite” I checked out a while back; Civil War cannon gracing the cover.
In this case the larger event in Doctorow’s The March is General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea during the final year of the American Civil War. Indeed, it was this march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia that devastated the Confederate Army and helped bring about their surrender. Plantations were looted and burned, railroads were destroyed, the enslaved were liberated, and the overwhelming material superiority of the Union was brought to bear. (I offer as evidence to my earlier point that, in writing this without much explanation, I am safely assuming that you are familiar with many of the terms I have used here: to wit, I am extremely confident that you know where Georgia is and its place in the Civil War, you know what a plantation is, you know what the Confederate Army and the Union are).
While the story offers insight into historical figures like General Sherman, the beauty of this book rests with others; a pair of Confederate soldiers who pretend to be in the Union Army, an enslaved teenage girl who passes as a white drummer boy, an English journalist and a photographer documenting the march, a Union battlefield surgeon that uses the experience to advance medical knowledge, freed slaves who straggle along behind the army, and more.
And it is this collection of perspectives that begins to define Doctorow and move us toward understanding the quality of Doctorow-ness. And it is not that he is simply a great and entertaining story-teller; there are many writers who fit this description. The essence of Doctorow—from The March and all of his books that I have so far read—is that permeating his historical fiction is the idea that history is so much more than the famous players and famous events that make it into history textbooks. Doctorow’s unique gift is that he recognizes and expertly portrays the manner in which each of us experiences the events of our day in our own unique way. In this, Doctorow’s The March, while exploring the larger events of the Civil War, also includes the manner in which it touches each soul differently, randomly, violently. The March is personal; and despite the fictional characters that populate its pages… eminently real.
Other Doctorow novels follow similar up-close personal reflections while being set within very different historical events. Welcome To Hard Times (1960) portrays the hardscrabble lives of those trying to build a town in the Dakota Territory after the Civil War and prior to statehood. Among the challenges they face are the random violence in a lawless land and the palpable despair of a punishing winter. Doctorow doesn’t just tell us this story; his meandering sentences get us into the minds of Will Blue, the unofficial mayor of Hard Times; Molly Riordan, a reluctant prostitute; Jimmy Fee, whose father has been murdered by bad guy Clay Turner; Zar, a Russian pimp, and more. There is no glamour in this one, just some raw human suffering and the individual struggle to kindle hope.
Billy Bathgate (1989) is set during 1930s New York City as real-life gangster Dutch Schultz fends off a rival gang and the law. Fifteen year-old Billy Bathgate draws the attention and admiration of Schultz. What follows is a first-person narrative exploring the brutal violence and deep societal corruption that defined much of this era. Again, Doctorow gets us into Billy’s mind with lengthy sentences that resemble human thought. We don’t think in sentences, do we? Here’s an account of Billy witnessing the murder of one of Schultz’ men who had betrayed him. On a boat out over the Atlantic Ocean Bo Weinberg’s lower legs were in a bathtub filled with cement:
“…and so Bo Weinberg was on his own in catastrophic solitude when the pilot engaged the engine and the boat suddenly shot forward and Mr. Schultz in his shirtsleeves and suspenders appeared and came up behind him and lifted one stockinged foot and shoved it in the small of Bo’s back, and the hands broken from their grasp and the body’s longing lunge for balance where there was none, careening leaning backward he went over into the sea and the last thing I saw were the arms which had gone up, and the shot white cuffs and the pale hands reaching for heaven.”
Other Doctorow books I have enjoyed:
The Book of Daniel (1971) follows the thinking of the son of accused communist spies that closely resemble Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; a couple executed in 1953 for passing along nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Red Scare.
Big as Life (1966) strays from Doctorow’s historical fiction while examining the manner in which an urban society responds to a very visible but unknown threat. This one seems to draw upon an America on the verge of social upheaval in the mid-1960s and the manner in which we individually evaluate the unknown and our government’s seemingly reflexive need to shoot first and ask questions later.
City of God (2000) is a stream of consciousness that at first confuses. I think if I had chosen this as my first experience with E.L. Doctorow, I might have put it down after fifty pages and that would have been the end of it. However, after having explored these other wonderful and enlightening books, I stuck with it. By page 100, I was hooked. Jumping through time and space, these seemingly disparate stories eventually merge into a multicolored tapestry of human morality and philosophy. Two of the story lines include a large crucifix stolen from a church and placed on the roof of a synagogue. The other is a young Jewish boy in a ghetto during World War II and the effort to document Nazi atrocities. Suffice to say, it is a great revelation when the stories eventually merge.
As to my original point: While the work of E.L. Doctorow is certainly not suitable for a K-8 audience, I believe it still represents the spirit of cultural literacy; he is an author we should all be familiar with just as we all understand and know American literary icons like Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Again, to my culturally literate friends, you probably already knew that.
