ABSTRACT

Literacy thus denotes both autonomous membership of an educated public, and yet also a technique of socialization. This ambivalence of literacy was evident in the different dispositions towards the standard language and the curriculum produced by popular education in the nineteenth century. E. D. Hirsch's approach to literacy has both technical and political aspects. His technical argument is that reading is a process of decoding words, phrases, and clauses so as to recover the meaning a text contains, and that 'world knowledge' is a prerequisite for this process to be carried out successfully; if, that is, it is to go beyond a purely mechanical decoding. The delusions and disavowals of Hirsch's faith in the integrative power of literacy and education are particularly evident in his account of how the bonds of national community are established through a shared language. The moral of these other histories of language, power and exclusion is that Hirsch misrecognizes national language and cultural literacy.