City Desk: Green Acres

had anything much to say about their work. She just knew their names, which I didn’t. Having never encountered anyone like this before, I was instantly smitten with her. One day a few weeks later, after returning to campus in Providence, Rhode Island, I came across a group of high-school seniors being given a tour of the college by a student guide. The guide was gesturing grandly toward the city’s skyline of one-and-a-half skyscrapers and boasting that “Providence has everything New York does, just in smaller quantities!” Cringing and humiliated, I thought, Yeah, everything but girls who know who Cindy Sherman is.

Some conservatives have insisted that knowing certain facts is not merely a sign of sophistication, but actually constitutes the heart of a good education. This was more or less the thesis advanced by educator E. D. Hirsch Jr. in his 1987 book, Cultural Literacy. But is Hirsch right? Around the time his book came out, I was driving an Oldsmobile with Rhode Island plates. At a gas station on Long Island, I was startled when the attendant, a high-school kid, looked at my plates, mentally scratched his head, and asked, “Huh, Rhode Island. Is that . . . a state?” Rhode Island sits, of course, just across Block Island Sound from the eastern tip of Long Island.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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had anything much to say about their work. She just knew their names, which I didn’t. Having never encountered anyone like this before, I was instantly smitten with her. One day a few weeks later, after returning to campus in Providence, Rhode Island, I came across a group of high-school seniors being given a tour of the college by a student guide. The guide was gesturing grandly toward the city’s skyline of one-and-a-half skyscrapers and boasting that “Providence has everything New York does, just in smaller quantities!” Cringing and humiliated, I thought, Yeah, everything but girls who know who Cindy Sherman is.

Some conservatives have insisted that knowing certain facts is not merely a sign of sophistication, but actually constitutes the heart of a good education. This was more or less the thesis advanced by educator E. D. Hirsch Jr. in his 1987 book, Cultural Literacy. But is Hirsch right? Around the time his book came out, I was driving an Oldsmobile with Rhode Island plates. At a gas station on Long Island, I was startled when the attendant, a high-school kid, looked at my plates, mentally scratched his head, and asked, “Huh, Rhode Island. Is that . . . a state?” Rhode Island sits, of course, just across Block Island Sound from the eastern tip of Long Island.