To E. D. Hirsch Jr., the blame for the decline of literacy in America rests squarely on the schools, not on the usual scapegoats of social class, family structure, incompetent teachers and television. Over the last 50 years, he says, the schools have been dominated by faulty educational theories.

Those theories stem from educator John Dewey, who believed that children could learn general skills from a few typical experiences and should not be made to accumulate factual information. He was deeply influenced by the romantic conceptions of French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who thought that children's natural development should be encouraged and that adult ideas should not be foisted upon them.

Dewey's ideal of content-neutral teaching still holds sway and, Hirsch contends, has led to the steady erosion of our store of shared information, our cultural heritage. As our schools began emphasizing the "decoding" skills of reading over the imparting of specific information, they began turning out scores of graduates who can recognize, pronounce and understand words but do not have the store of background information essential to making sense of what they read.

In the late 1970s Hirsch, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, conducted some reading experiments with community-college students in Richmond, Va. In one experiment, the students were given a prose selection about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee meeting at Appomattox Courthouse to work out the terms for the surrender of Lee's army. The students found the passage extremely difficult to grasp-not because they did not understand such words in the selection as "burdensome," "reliability" and "reassurance" but because they did not know who Grant and Lee were, even though they were attending school in a city that was the capital of the Confederacy.

"We wouldn't have believed it if somebody had told us (beforehand) that these kids didn't know who Grant and Lee were," says Hirsch. "The decline in the verbal SAT scores began to be most marked around 1973, but when I was doing these experiments, it wasn't so noticeable that the traditional background information was lacking in students. So that was the first time it came to my attention."

Continuing with special urgency his research into the nature of reading, Hirsch soon realized that the mechanical skills of literacy-reading and writing-were only 10 percent of the problem, and general knowledge-of facts and ideas-was 90 percent.

"Cultural literacy," the grasp of background information that most writers and speakers assume their readers and listeners already have, is the key to effective education, Hirsch says. That background information, even when much of it is rather vague, is what enables us to grasp the point of a magazine article or make sense of a television news broadcast because it allows us to make connections between new information and what we already know, without stopping to check an encyclopedia or dictionary or almanac every few words.

In his best-selling book "Cultural Literacy" (Houghton Mifflin, $16.95), Hirsch, who has changed from scholar to educational activist, calls for nothing less than a counter-revolution to establish, by consensus, a body of information that everyone should know and to restore that substance to our schools, especially in kindergarten and the early grades.

Recent surveys and anecdotal evidence underscore Hirsch's perceptions about a widening information gap. One study of 1,000 16- to 18-year-olds revealed that over a quarter of them thought that Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during the Vietnam War. Another study found that three-fourths of high school seniors could not identify Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau; half did not know who Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin were. Then there is the girl in Latin class (Hirsch's son, John, was the teacher) who thought she was learning the language spoken in Latin America. And the UCLA junior who thought Toronto must be a town in Italy.

"You see, you've got this paradox," Hirsch says. "The theories our schools are running under are progressive theories, that we should educate everybody and train everybody according to his abilities and train people for the actual workplace and so on. That all sounds very democratic, but the effect has been undemocratic because it simply kept the social status quo or even worsened it.

"The community college where I conducted experiments was largely black, and (those students) didn't have the background knowledge, while the University of Virginia students in the '70s, (who were) certainly predominantly white, middle-class and fairly good students, knew all that or most of it.

"This whole notion of cultural literacy has rather mindlessly, in my view, been called 'elitist.' It's just the opposite. The current school curriculum does much more harm to poor kids than to middle-class kids. That's because the middle-class kids-though, increasingly, they, too, have been declining in communication skills-do get some of the background knowledge at home, whereas the poor kids don't.

"The paradox that some people find very difficult to understand is that to teach traditional literate culture is not only not elitist, it's the only way to include people in the club who have been excluded."

In 1983, after Hirsch published an essay on cultural literacy in a scholarly journal, William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and now Secretary of Education in Ronald Reagan's second administration, heartily endorsed Hirsch's ideas. Although that endorsement helped give Hirsch credence, it also prompted some liberals to attack him.

"My relation with William Bennett is interesting," says Hirsch, who describes his own ideology as "liberal and classless and fair, that general point of view" but notes that he possesses a scientific temperament and is driven by facts, not ideology.

"We're (all) working for some of the same goals, but there is one point I wish would get into people's minds, and that is that what I'm talking about should be conceived of as 'multipartisan,' that is, something accepted not only by conservatives but also by liberals. And the liberals have not gotten that message. I'm a little concerned. Some of them have gotten it, but only a very, very few sophisticated ones."

The bone of contention is a 4,500-item provisional list included in Hirsch's book that attempts to illustrate the range of information that literate Americans tend to share. Compiled by Hirsch and two University of Virginia colleagues, historian Joseph Kett and physicist James Trefil, in consultation with more than 100 nonacademic people, that list includes geographical names, historical events, dates, famous people, patriotic lore, song and book titles, literary and scientific terms.

Precise or encyclopedic knowledge of each term is not essential, Hirsch stresses; general familiarity is sufficient. "Only a small proportion of literate people can name the Shakespeare plays in which Falstaff appears, yet they know who he is," Hirsch says. "They know what 'Mein Kampf' is, but they haven't read it."

The list, Hirsch acknowledges, has become a "two-edged" thing. It has drawn sharp attention to a fairly technical book that otherwise might not have reached a wide audience, but it also has detracted from the book's central message and given critics an easy opening, allowing them to dismiss it as an elitist and arbitrary form of Trivial Pursuit.

Those critics "are not thinking the issues through," Hirsch says. "I'm not saying that everybody should memorize the list. The list is a suggestion about what concepts and words needed to be known, however they were conveyed. This list should start a conversation. It's not supposed to end it."

In some ways, Hirsch says, his book is like a modern "Pygmalion" done in a scholarly way. "Prof. Higgins was saying that there isn't that much difference between a flower girl and a duchess. It's all in a finite body of information. See, (George Bernard) Shaw was demystifying aristocratic culture, in a way. In 'My Fair Lady,' Rex Harrison said, 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' In this context, why can't disadvantaged kids be like advantaged kids? Why not? It's just a matter of the right kinds of training. What I'm trying to do is demystify mainstream culture.

"You'd think people would regard that as a liberal idea, a socially progressive idea. The sociologists seem to think that this kind of demystification is naive. I don't think it's naive at all. I think they are unnecessarily mystifying class, particularly in this country, where we have a disposition against class distinctions."

New research on reading shows that learning how to read is not an orderly process in which we first learn to identify words, then decode the meaning of words, next combine words to get meanings of sentences and, finally, the meaning of a whole text. It's more complicated than that. We also supply information that is not directly stated in the words, what Hirsch and others call "schemata"-simple ideas suggested by the words that stand in for more complicated background information.

Therefore, Hirsch argues, more of that background information must be included in school textbooks if our citizens are to be truly literate and our nation able to compete in the modern world.

"In the age of technology, communications have to be more effective and subtle, and we all have to be able to speak a common public language," he says. "And the more we have of this background knowledge in all dimensions, the more of this subtle communication we're able to engage in. If I'm a technologist, (that background) will include not just (knowledge about) 'interfaces,' 'input,' 'software' and so on (dealing) with computers, but it will also include my ability to refer to Humpty-Dumpty or Shakespeare in order to convey my point.

"It's well-known that our common core of knowledge has been declining, and that means our communications have gotten more primitive. TV is primitive now not because TV is a debasing medium. If TV weren't primitive, it couldn't be understood. If our school system were more effective, TV would follow suit."

The popular argument that America's diverse population makes matters more difficult does not wash with Hirsch. He points to France, which was not always a country with a single language. "It was the school system that turned peasants into Frenchmen during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century," he says. "The school system deliberately tried to acculturate all the provinces in the same culture and same language.

"It's peculiar to think that all of our diversities are greater than the diversities that existed in France. They're not really greater, and, in fact, with our current communications, the diversities are less than those that existed in France. It's the school-transmitted culture that turns a country into a literate country. Those schools have to teach common information as well as a common language. That's the only way we become a nation."

Hirsch and his two colleagues are completing a dictionary that will provide what is important to know about the 4,500 items on the list. And Hirsch has established a foundation to encourage the teaching of literate materials in the schools, particularly in the early grades. The foundation was made possible with seed money from Exxon, and future funding will come from the sale of a 12th-grade general-knowledge test authored by Hirsch and scheduled for publication within a year.

"Another function of the foundation would be to avoid the misuse of the list by giving a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval to materials that effectively transmit the information, don't trivialize it and don't encourage cramming-all the terrible things that people say will happen whenever you make a list."

ARE YOU LITERATE ENOUGH TO RECOGNIZE THE FOLLOWING ITEMS?

Here is a sampling from E. D. Hirsch's list of names, facts, phrases and concepts that seem to be part of the common knowledge of most literate Americans. These 50 items were selected from a list of 4,500 pieces of information compiled by Hirsch and two colleagues. Basic recognition, not in- depth knowledge, is sufficient to make each item qualify as part of one's background knowledge. (The "answers" to these items are on page 18.)

1. Achilles' heel

2. Louisa May Alcott

3. animism

4. as rich as Croesus

5. Benedict Arnold

6. Babbitt

7. Brisbane

8. carte blanche

9. Davy Jones' locker

10. deus ex machina

11. ecumenism

12. Elysian Fields

13. Ralph Waldo Emerson

14. featherbedding

15. food chain

16. gamma rays

17. Good fences make good neighbors.

18. hoi polloi

19. I came, I saw, I conquered (veni, vidi, vici).

20. Icarus

21. interventionism

22. jeremiad

23. Franz Kafka

24. lip service

25. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

26. Ferdinand Magellan

27. mare's nest

28. Monroe Doctrine

29. neoclassicism

30. n.b.

31. Old King Cole

32. paradigm

33. Elvis Presley

34. rhetorical question

35. romanticism

36. Romulus and Remus

37. Sacco-Vanzetti case

38. Slough of Despond

39. Joseph Stalin

40. Sword of Damocles

41. taproot

42. Tet offensive

43. There is a tide in the affairs of men

44. vector

45. Vermeer

46. Booker T. Washington

47. The Waste Land (title)

48. witch hunt

49. yellow press

50. Zeitgeist

ANSWERS TO LITERATE LIST

SUNDAY's random selection of terms from E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s master list has a built-in bias: What seems common knowledge to one person may make another feel like a dunce. However, had the first 50 items under one letter of the alphabet been presented here, literate people, Hirsch says, would know 80 to 90 percent of those items. Either way, the selection is daunting enough.

1. A small but mortal weakness. The mythological hero Achilles, invulnerable except in the heel, was killed by an arrow that struck it.

2. American author of "Little Women" and other children's books.

3. Belief that every being and thing has a soul.

4. King of Lydia, 560-546 B.C., noted for his wealth.

5. American Revolutionary general who turned traitor.

6. Smugly conventional person interested only in business and social success, after George Babbitt in Sinclair Lewis's novel "Babbitt."

7. Capital of Queensland, Australia.

8. Freedom to do what one wishes (French for "blank card").

9. Bottom of the sea, especially as the grave of those who perish at sea.

10. A deity brought in by stage machinery to intervene in ancient Greek and Roman plays.

11. Movement to promote understanding among different religious faiths.

12. Mythological land of bliss and contentment.

13. American philosopher, essayist and poet.

14. Limiting output or using more workers than needed to maintain jobs or create more of them.

15. Process whereby each organism of a community feeds on the member below it.

16. Power emitted by nucleus of radioactive substance.

17. Refrain of the tradition-minded neighbor in Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall."

18. The common people, usually in a derogatory sense (Greek for "the many").

19. Caesar's report to the Roman senate of victory.

20. Legendary son of Daedalus who flew too close to the Sun and fell to his death.

21. One nation interfering in the affairs of another.

22. Tale of woe, from Jeremiah's biblical lamentations.

23. Austrian-Czech writer of the surreal and nightmarish.

24. Insincere expression of support.

25. Poet who drew on American colonial history for some of his poems, including "Paul Revere's Ride."

26. Portuguese navigator, c.1480-1521, led Spanish ships that were first to circumnavigate the world.

27. Extraordinarily complex situation; a hoax or delusion.

28. President James Monroe's policy that the U.S. would not brook interference in the Americas by outside powers.

29. Revival of classical esthetics in art, music and literature.

30. Nota bene (Latin for "note well").

31. The "merry old soul" of the traditional nursery rhyme who called for his pipe, bowl and fiddlers three.

32. Example or pattern.

33. The King of rock and roll.

34. A question asked for effect, no answer expected.

35. Literary and artistic movement emphasizing imagination, emotions and free expression of individual.

36. Mythical founder of Rome and his twin brother.

37. Their conviction and execution for murder and payroll theft in 1920 aroused international protests.

38. The swamp of despair in John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."

39. Authoritarian Soviet leader; premier of USSR from 1941 to 1953.

40. Any imminent danger.

41. Main root from which others branch.

42. Major Viet Cong action during Vietnam War timed to coincide with 1968 New Year festival.

43. From Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," meaning, "Act now or regret it forever."

44. Line showing size and direction.

45. Dutch artist known for his luminous paintings.

46. Black educator, 1856-1915, who said blacks should work for advances in education and employment instead of pushing for social equality.

47. Most famous work of American-born British poet T. S. Eliot.

48. Investigation supposedly to uncover wrongdoing but really to harass political opposition.

49. Sensational journalism.

50. Spirit of the age (from the German zeit, "era," and geist, "spirit").

CAPTION:

DRAWING: Illustration by Tom Herzberg.

PHOTO: Photo by Catherine Bricker. Prof. E. D. Hirsch of the University of Virginia.