A Pragmatic Support for E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy Curriculum
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Authors
McKinney, Shawn Michael
Issue Date
1999
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
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Abstract
The educational curriculum proposed by E.D. Hirsch, cultural literacy, is based on the idea that shared general knowledge among members of a society facilitates discourse
among those members, as well as a platform for comparing and understanding the
knowledge of other societies. Hirsch's work focuses on emancipatory and
communicative justifications for his program, but omits any kind of specific
epistemological base. To that end I propose that Hirsch's program would be well served
by adopting an epistemology of the sort Richard Rorty presents in his works on
pragmatism. A pragmatic epistemology rejects the correspondence theory of truth in
favor of socially agreed upon standards for truth determined experientially. This type of
approach to knowledge acknowledges the influence of social and historical factors in
knowledge determination. My argument is that this pragmatic epistemology supports
cultural literacy by making the criteria for acceptable beliefs the very object of the
cultural literacy program, specifically the historical and cultural beliefs of a given society.
Description
30 p.
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License
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