n an article about the good deeds of E.D. Hirsch, the recently deceased American cultural literacy superstar Christopher Hitchens dropped alarming findings from a nationwide survey: “The chances of a 17-year-old American being able to say anything meaningful about Thomas Jefferson are disconcertingly slight. The chances of the same student knowing anything significant about Poe, or slavery, or of being able to translate the most elementary Latin ... or even being able to define the word ‘ironic’ are slighter still.”
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