Culturescope [antikvár]

The word is out—our American educational system is in dire straits. It's hard to turn on a news program or open a paper these days without being hit with doomsday accounts of declining SAT scores, drastic cost-cutting measures at public and private institutions, and the woeful position of educators in our country. It's scary. It's alarming. You may even have heard that Western culture itself is on the wane, possibly as the direct result of Americans' lamentable and overwhelming lack of knowledge about it. Relax It's true that many people, even college-educated, gainfully employed Americans, don't know a lot of basic facts about world culture—the facts that, taken together, make up our collective cultural memory, the knowl-edge-bank that is at the core of our national psyche. To be culturally literate is to be able to stand comfortably on common ground with the