An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn't

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When this book was first published in the spring of 1987, literacy was in the air. Well, not literacy itself—almost everyone we knew was still misusing lie and lay and seemed resigned to never getting beyond the first hundred pages of Remembrance of Things Past. Rather, literacy as a concept, a cover story, an idea to rant, fret, and, of course, Do Something about. Allan Bloom’s snarling denunciation of Americans’ decadent philistinism in The Closing of the American Mind, followed closely by E. D. Hirsch’s laundry list, in Cultural Literacy, of names, dates, and concepts—famous if often annoying touchstones, five thousand of them in the first volume alone—fueled discussion groups and call-in talk shows and spawned a whole mini-industry of varyingly comprehensive, competent, and clever guides to American history, say, or geography, or science, which most people not only hadn’t retained but also didn’t feel they’d understood to begin with. At the same time, there was that rancorous debate over expanding the academic “canon,” or core curriculum, to include more than the standard works by Dead White European Males, plus Jane Austen and W. E. B. Du Bois, a worthy but humorless brouhaha characterized—and this was the high point—by mobs of Stanford students chanting, “Hey hey ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Emerging from our rooms, where we’d been holed up with our portable typewriters and the working manuscript of An Incomplete Education for most of the decade, we blinked, looked around, and remarked thoughtfully, “Boy, this ought to sell a few books.”

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