The Cultural Literacy movement is gaining ground today as the public demands some assurance that schools are really teaching the "right stuff" and that children are learning it. What better way to achieve these goals than to write down exactly what the right stuff is, tell it to students, then test them to make sure that they got it? Such a system seems to be rational.
The problem is that such a notion of the right stuff flies in the face of what we know about how the mind works. The Cultural Literacy movement, which purports to be founded on scientific findings concerning how people use knowledge, is actually based on a flawed notion of what people are and how they operate. Not only does the cultural literacy movement suffer from the generic problems inherent in other fixed curricular systems, it also faces a set of problems that stems from its rigid and faulty theories of what knowledge is, how people learn, and how teaching should be conducted.
Where am I in the content of the book?
