In 1988 the author and educator Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr. published his manifesto ‘Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know’. Hirsch defined cultural literacy as the ability to understand and engage with the history, traditions, and practices of a group of people.  

 As he put it: 

“Those who possess this shared unspoked knowledge can understand and communicate; those who don’t, can’t. Exclusion from this shared cultural knowledge is a major barrier to equal opportunity.” 

‘Culture’ in this context isn’t limited to theatre, literature, painting, or music. His argument wasn’t that everyone should be forced to read the same books.  

Hirsch’s vision was of a common language of ideas which would add meaning and depth to everyday interactions. This national canon would enable every American citizen to commune, communicate, and collaborate more fruitfully with one another.  

Just imagine how powerful this could be in the workplace.  

Technology is fuelling the pace of diversification within modern society and now organisations are struggling to keep up with generational vocabulary and behaviours, let alone starting to tackle the issues of equity and social mobility.  

Hirsch believed that a unified frame of reference, established as a matter of policy through education*, would be a great leveller, improving every citizen’s ability to navigate civic, social, and professional situations and thereby improve living standards. 

Most employers aren’t engaged in education policy, but some of the ideas above might feel familiar.  

For example, those of us working in DEI will recognise that a shared frame of reference and set of experiences can unify a group as strongly as it excludes those on the outside.  

And those of us who work on leadership and culture transformation would agree that a canon of ideas – like a shared mission, objectives, values or standards – can drive group cohesion, engagement, and effectiveness. 

So, is there anything within Hirsch’s work that we can apply to the business of attracting, engaging, and retaining people at work? To answer that question, it’s useful to think about how his ideas have failed to gain traction. 

Hirsch believed that a nation’s cultural canon should be not dominant but dialectic; that it should not be the preserve of one privileged group but should be organic, evolving, and shaped by the diverse identities that comprise the peoples of that nation.  

36 years later we still have a long way to go. We believe the testimony of minority groups when they tell us their stories are not told and heard. Where minority groups acquire cultural literacy of the majority group through immersion, the majority is all too often illiterate when it comes to the cultural canon of minority groups.  

Given this disparity, it’s natural that some groups should reject the mainstream. When the national canon doesn’t reflect the diversity of that nation’s people, adoption is not empowerment, but assimilation and erasure. 

What Hirsch failed to acknowledge is that, regardless of their engagement with the mainstream, individual groups exhibit deep cultural literacy within their own frames of reference. It is a mistake to conflate rejection of a national canon with cultural illiteracy. 

Our vision is of a more inclusive future in which organisations build and demonstrate cultural literacy for all the diverse identities that comprise their employee base. Instead of insisting people align with a standard, the future-facing employer will meet people where they are, seeing and accepting them, and delivering experiences and communications which are more accessible, more inclusive, and more magnetic.  

The business case for inclusion is clear, and inclusion requires cultural literacy. But where to start? Here are six key questions: 

 

Listening 

Q1. Do I understand the diverse range of cultural identities within my organisation and candidate employee audiences? 

Q2. Do I understand the collective memory (the stories, references, and shared expectations) of each group regarding their experience of employment? 

Q3. Are all groups given sufficient space and safety to share their needs with the organisation without judgement or negative consequence?  

 

Acting 

Q4. How can leadership styles change to account for different cultural needs?  

Q5. How can communications and experiences adapt contextually to meet different cultural needs? 

Q6. How can we build empathy by making cultural literacy a key feature of our corporate culture? 

 

This last question is critical; cultural literacy provides a fresh approach to building empathy through our organisations (see our recent report on Gen Z and #WorkTok). An ability to build and demonstrate cultural literacy will be the defining characteristic of the most celebrated employers of the future.  

 

Joe Hoppard, Strategy and Planning Director 

joe@brandpointzero.com 

*The idea that education should (at least in part) be about the business of accumulating information was counter to the prevalent attitude in American education at the time which held that education should be primarily focussed on the natural development of skills and competencies (Rousseau and Dewey). Hirsch refuted this, claiming that American education was failing children by not equipping them with the unspoken, shared knowledge necessary to participate fully in life as a citizen. This failure, he believed, was damning them to a future of disenfranchisement and poverty.