Cultural Literacy

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1. fiftyfiftyMar 2022
   There is a lot of evidence that I think backs up your anecdata. For example Massachusetts has the highest performing public school system in the US (arguably, but by many measures) and their curriculum is based on the content heavy Core Curriculum (not to be confused with the watered down Common Core) created by E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch was a college professor and his argument is that knowledge is a significant portion of literacy, he witnessed this first hand trying to teach college freshman that simply didn't have the background knowledge to understand the college level books Hirsch was teaching, even though they had no problem reading the words. Hirsch's books "Cultural Literacy" and "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" go into detail about this and he has some essays available online that are worth reading.
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2. thundergolferFeb 2023
   Look at long term stats on mathematics ability and literacy in the rich western countries. It does not paint a good picture. Two things I know off the top of my head is that literacy scores in the SATs have trended slightly down over the past 40 years, for both low-achievers and high-achievers.[1]

   Australia, one of the richest countries in the world, is experiencing a multi-decade decline in mathematical standing[2]. Australia is fabulously rich, but is doing a worse and worse job of producing citizens that are numerate and understand mathematics. I haven't looked at literacy performance in the country, but I'd guess it's declining like it is in the USA, as Australia is subject to broadly the same pressures of political-economy and technology.

   1. Cultural Literacy by E.D Hirsch Jr

   2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517094842.h...

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3. a9h74jOct 2022
   You might find some tiny encouragement seeing E.D. Hirsch's "Core Knowledge" curriculum efforts.[1] I don't see it on the reference page, but I have seen accounts of first-graders really taking to culture-and-civilization (and picture book) focussed units around "Ancient Egypt" etc.

   IIRC, E.D. Hirsch, in his book Cultural Literacy, related a conversation with educators. He offerred that children should be able to name and identify Earth's continents. As he reports it, the reply as if with disbelief was "Why would anyone need to know that."

   [1] https://www.coreknowledge.org/curriculum/history-geography/

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4. JachSep 2020
   Remember the 90s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pa6SGYWADU

   E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote "Cultural Literacy" in 1987, with an update in 2002 as "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". It's a huge collection of thousands of words/phrases/concepts/devices/people/places/etc, across multiple categories, that most Americans will already know the majority of their meanings, or at least find them somewhat familiar. I personally like randomly looking at the proverbs and idioms and sometimes finding parallels in other languages. It'd be interesting to go through it at random with a 7th grader and see what they've picked up -- like who says "there's more than one way to skin a cat" these days, but also who grew up in the US and doesn't understand its meaning? The book contends that about 80% of the knowledge shared by the literate has not changed for over a hundred years. Meanwhile for the 20% that changes (or is brand new) Asimov once wrote a chapter (9 in http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-on-numbers...) on how so much once-common knowledge has been happily forgotten -- who needs to know about compound addition?

   For the professional context, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf et al. claim you need to know 70k plus or minus 20k things in your field to be an effective expert. I think it's also why it can be easily rewarding to chat about work with colleagues, you both have a lot in common just on the basis of the shared profession.

   In short, I wouldn't worry about running out of shared knowledge, nor even shared preferences and tastes, for yourself or for the world.

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5. mathattackOct 2013
   I once had to deal with someone working in the test prep industry that had two ivy league degrees and couldn't get the population of the US within 200 million. It was striking that this was someone who represented the pinnacle of our education system, training the next generation to get into the elite.

   E.D. Hirsch [1] has written a lot about needing to know content in order to properly reason. Some of this goes by classical education, elsewhere it's cultural literacy [2].

   [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr.

   [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy

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