t this is what they need to 'join the club.'"
Using Mr. Hirsch's books, 1st graders would learn, for example, about the early history of Egypt, Babylon, and the major religions. They would be taught how deciduous and evergreen trees differ and read "Cinderella" and "The Three Billy Goats Gruff."
A 2nd-grade pupil, according to Mr. Hirsch, should be expected to understand fractions, discuss the architecture of the Parthenon, and know the origins of Greek tragedy.
Like Cultural Literacy, the new curriculum projects are expected to generate skepticism among some educators. Critics of the earlier book, for example, took Mr. Hirsch to task for emphasizing the teaching of "rote" facts and focusing heavily on Western civilization.
In his forthcoming books, Mr. Hirsch addresses at least one of those criticisms by including more about the achievements of nonWestern cultures. Students would be taught, for example, about Mae Jemison, the country's first black female astronaut-in-training, and about riots, or African storytellers.
"In my first book, I was trying to describe American culture as it then stood, rather offer a prescription for what a person ought to know," said Mr. Hirsch, who is the Linden Kent Professor of English at the University of Virginia. "What I've come to realize was that to include that kind of information was not as prescriptive as I had thought; there was a kind of new consensus, and I was five or six years behind where I should've been."
The remaining books in the series, concluding at the 6th-grade level, are scheduled to be published in 1993 and 1994.
Pilot Test in Florida
Mr. Hirsch's complete curriculum, meanwhile, was used for the first time this past school year at Three Oaks Elementary School in Fort Myers, Fla. The Hirsch curriculum accounts for about half of what is taught there, according to Constance Jones, the school's principal.
This year, another 19 elementary schools in the school district are expected to adopt the curriculum.
Mr. Hirsch said the sequence was developed by comparing the list published in Cultural Literacy with national curricula in a number of other countries, including Sweden, France, and Japan. A committee of scholars also recommended multicultural information to add to the list. And groups of teachers in two states reviewed the resulting master list to determine which topics should be introduced at each grade level.
About 100 educators, parents, and experts from a variety of disciplines met in 1990 to pare down the resulting list and determine the final sequence, according to Mr. Hirsch.
"We're not pretending to be the whole story," said Mr. Hirsch, who donates all the proceeds from his commercial books to the foundation. "But you've got to have something concrete and manageable in order to go forward."
Vol. 11, Issue 01, Page 14Published in Print: September 4, 1991, as Hirsch To Publish 'Cultural Literacy' Curriculum for Grades 1-6