More than 50 years have passed since an Oklahoma high school boy stood and recited his homework from the night before: "The stag at eve had drunk his fill,/Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,/And deep his midnight lair had made/In lone Glenartney's hazel shade . . ."

The boy had no clear image of a stag; he was uncertain about the nature of a rill, and he could hazard only a guess that Glenartney was somewhere in Scotland. He pronounced it "the staggit eve," and he vaguely comprehended that this was not the greatest masterpiece of poetry. But the class was studying Sir Walter Scott, and the opening stanzas of "The Lady of the Lake" had to be put to memory.

When the class got to Byron, the boy would plunge into, "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,/And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold." He would get to know Kubla Khan, who built that stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. He would have a go at Hamlet, and he would give his older sister the giggles by asking with Lady Macbeth if this were a dagger -- gestures of horror! -- that he saw before him, the handle -- aagh! -- toward his hand.

All this came to mind with publication of a provocative book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. The principal author is Professor E.D. Hirsch Jr. of the University of Virginia.

The authors' premise is that our predecessors left us a cultural inheritance, and that we are squandering it in our own time. Our legacy includes a treasure of names, events, phrases and allusions, drawn from history and from literature, that educated people once were expected to prize. To have at least a nodding acquaintance with Ulysses and Aeneas, with Galileo, Pythagoras and Newton, with Tiny Tim and the Mad Hatter -- this is what literacy is all about.

Not all of our cultural inheritance is of ancient origin. A literate person today should at least recognize the names of Andrew Carnegie, Betty Friedan and Frank Lloyd Wright. The high school graduate who is ignorant of Kent State, Pearl Harbor and Brown vs. Board of Education has missed the cultural boat.

It was Gibbon, if memory serves, who once remarked upon the universal tendency of mankind to glorify the past and to deprecate the present, and perhaps that is all I am doing here. But much evidence exists that our cultural legacy is not being enhanced; it is being diminished by the lightweight schedules that characterize too many public schools.

I doubt that Hirsch's collection of 5,000 items of cultural inheritance will remedy the situation, but it surely provides a useful reference source. His catalog ranges from abolitionism to Zionism, with gradualism, liberalism and surrealism in between. He says that today's educated person should know what Karl Marx was up to in Das Kapital. The cultural literate ought not to be unhorsed by references to David Hume, Adam Smith and Lord Keynes.

Perhaps we ask too much of today's high school students, and of their teachers. Perhaps. There is more to life than quoting Shakespeare on the death of Caesar. But when Idaho's Sen. Steve Symms voted the other day to abandon his president, and to vote to override a veto, today's student should have recognized a poignant question: Et tu, Brute?