How Culturally Literate Are You?: A Quiz
Everyone Suffers in a World Where No One Knows Anything
On the first day of freshman year, my Pre-AP English literature teacher, Mrs Pauley, gave us an exam that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since.
The exam had a hundred questions, and was designed to test our knowledge of something she called “cultural literacy”: history, television, film, popular music, famous lines by William Shakespeare, and so on.
At the time I don’t suppose I thought much of it—surely everyone knows the composer of “Ode to Joy”?—but as high school lengthened I met more people and uncovered frightening levels of ignorance. Legal adults—soon to graduate! who had spent twelve years or more in public schools!—who had never heard of Josef Stalin or Henry VIII, who couldn’t remember the word for “God” (“Isn’t that the Dude who made the world?” are actual words someone said to me).
This was in 2003 and 2004. It’s only gotten worse in the smartphone era. Today, this morning, someone tried to tell me that Alexandre Dumas has “been dead for two millennia,” a statement that calls into question their history, math and possibly reading skills. Last week a man informed me that Citizen Kane and King Arthur were movies with all-white casts, and thus of no interest to people of color. When I inquired further, he revealed that he thought King Arthur had originated with the movie of that name released in 2004. He was not aware of any previous King Arthur media. A very pious lady then added that the tales of King Arthur mustn’t be taught in school because they were written by Freemasons. (“If you really think that, it’s a wonder you can tie your own shoes,” I replied.)
I’m afraid America is nearing Philemona Cunk levels of stupidity. We are less informed than a comedian who pretends to be stupid on television.
I’ve seen a theory about literacy floated on social media, and it makes intuitive sense to me. The fact that American students, including elite college students, are struggling to read, has been widely reported. Professors at Yale and Harvard are cutting back on their assigned texts because students can’t complete the material. There are a number of things going on here—the ubiquity of screens, the short-sighted scuttling of phonics instruction—but one is simply this: kids are confused by the information contained in books because there are very basic historical, literary and cultural allusions that we have stopped teaching, and thus they don’t know. Jacob and Esau, Dick Whittington and his cat, Jack the Giant-Killer—you ask them to explain any of these enduring cultural symbols and they stare at you with blank faces. (Compound that with the average person’s lack of knowledge of the natural world, and it’s no wonder that they feel nothing when they read, say, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”) There was much discussion last year about a study finding that English literature majors at U. S. colleges could not parse the majestic first paragraph of Bleak House; one student, apparently thrown by the mention of “whiskers,” thought it had something to do with a cat. But if you’ve never been taught English history, and your only association with Lincoln is Honest Abe, how are you going to make sense of the words, “Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall?” What, to the American, is Michaelmas?
Helen Vendler, who taught literature at Harvard, Cornell and Boston University, warned in 1980 of the devastation that the removal of cultural literacy from curricula would inflict. In an address to the Modern Language Association of America, she said:
“Our students come to us from secondary school having read no works of literature in foreign languages and scarcely any works of literature in their own language. The very years, between twelve and eighteen, when they might be reading rapidly, uncritically, rangingly, happily, thoughtlessly, are somehow dissipated without cumulative force. Those who end their education with secondary school have been cheated altogether of their literary inheritance, from the Bible to Robert Lowell. It is no wonder that they do not love what we love; we as a culture have not taught them to. With a reformed curriculum beginning in preschool, all children would know about the Prodigal Son and the Minotaur; they would know the stories presumed by our literature, as children reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare or Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales once knew them. We can surely tell them the tales before they can read Shakespeare or Ovid; there are literary forms appropriate to every age, even the youngest. Nothing is more lonely than to go through life uncompanioned by a sense that others have also gone through it, and have left a record of their experience. Every adult needs to be able to think of Job, or Orpheus, or Circe, or Ruth, or Lear, or Jesus, or the Golden Calf, or the Holy Grail, or Antigone in order to refer private experience to some identifying frame or solacing reflection.”
To paraphrase Katherine Rundell, those who deny children the inheritance of these stories are thieves. “We need to be infinitely more furious that there are children without books”—and, I would add, that schools have abandoned their first mandate to produce culturally informed youth. We are all now reaping the consequences.
On that cheerful note… let’s test your cultural literacy!
01. Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine had three sons who became kings. One was Henry the Young King. Who were the others?
02. In the 1974 Carl Douglas disco hit ”Kung Fu Fighting,” “those fools” were as fast as what meteorological phenomenon?
03. In William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Mark Antony asks “friends” and “Romans” to lend him this appendage.
04. On 08 February, 1983, 105 million Americans tuned in to watch “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the feature-length finale of which acclaimed TV series?
05. Rudyard Kipling included this ancient symbol, once associated with luck, at the front of his books, until events of the 1930s compelled him to disavow its use.
06. The Owl and the Pussycat in Edward Lear’s poem went to sea in a “beautiful” boat of this color.
07. On 03 August, 1914, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously said these were going out all over Europe; “we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”
08. This martial artist and boxer turned actor played a larger-than-life bounty hunter who attempts to steal a baby in the Coen Brothers’ 1987 crime caper Raising Arizona.
09. John Keats had this bird in mind when he wrote, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down.”
10. This philosopher, excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam on 27 July, 1656, wrote a treatise on ethics that was translated into English by a great admirer, George Eliot.
11. “You best start believing in” these stories, Captain Barbossa informs Elizabeth Swann in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl; “you’re in one.”
12. Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV penitently knelt in the snow for several days seeking absolution from Pope Gregory VII outside the gates of this castle—a feat that present-day rulers might consider emulating.
13. When this admiral in the Union Navy was warned of the presence of torpedoes in nearby waters, he exclaimed, “Damn the torpedoes!”
14. He tells Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
15. This Anglo-Saxon king of Wessex converted to Christianity, renounced his kingship and retired to a monastery, only to be dragged out by supporters and forced to lead an army against invaders; refusing to bear arms, he was promptly slain.
16. “The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked,” warned this preacher in a 1741 sermon that inaugurated the Great Awakening.
17. “I am known in the world, and the world is wide,” brags this polymath in a song performed by the Decemberists for the Hamilton mixtape. He also has the distinction of being the only Founding Father to have an episode of The Office (U. S.) named after him.
18. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” says the title heroine in the first line of this rain-soaked Victorian-era novel, published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.
19. Actor Gregory Peck so loved the works of this English novelist that he sent copies to his son stationed in Vietnam.
20. Ben Stiller travels to Iceland in this 2013 film about a negative assets manager who struggles with daydreams, loosely adapted from a short story by James Thurber.
21. This biblical monarch, a “man after God’s own heart,” was forbidden to build the temple in Jerusalem, according to the prophet Nathan, because “thou hast been a man of war, and hast shed blood.”
22. Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s 1970 jibe about “nattering nabobs of negativism” was penned by this speechwriter who later became a New York Times columnist.
23. This Romantic-era composer penned the Trout Quintet and a symphony that was never finished.
24. “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? Or press down his tongue with a cord?” God opines from a whirlwind to the long-suffering protagonist of this book.
25. Famously bigoted president Woodrow Wilson screened this influential film at the White House, after which he reportedly said, “It’s like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true.”
26. He and a gang of friends “stole a huge load of pears,” which they then fed to hogs. Later in life, partly owing to the influence of his mother, St. Monica, he converted and became Bishop of Hippo.
27. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, this famed island monastery was first ravaged by “heathen savages,” the Vikings, in 793; it was also the setting of the 2025 Danny Boyle film 28 Years Later.
28. In the film Casablanca, Ilsa and Laszlo are seeking letters of transit signed by this future French president, who was also the subject of an assassination plot in the 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal.
29. “Of all men else I have avoided thee, but get thee back! My soul is too much charg’d with blood of thine already,” says Macbeth, near the end of his titular play, to this man not of woman born.
30. “Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo / If we haven’t enough to doo-oo-oo / We get the hump / Cameelious hump / The hump that is” what two colors, according to this Rudyard Kipling rhyme?
You’ll find the answers below the jump.
