ABSTRACT
The notion of textual authority is about the right-wing shift from the discourse of class to the broader relationship between knowledge and power, and about the struggle to control the very grounds on which knowledge is produced and legitimated. A more critical understanding of the relationship between culture and schooling would start with a definition of culture as a set of activities by which different groups produce collective memories, knowledge, social relations, and values within historically constituted relations of power. Hirsch's history lacks any concrete political and social referents, its causal relations are construed through a string of ideas, and it is presented without the benefit of substantive argument of historical context. By depoliticizing the issue of culture, Hirsch is unable to develop a view either of literacy or of pedagogy that acknowledges the complex workings of power as they are both produced and mediated through the cultural processes that structure school life.
