Hank Aaron, absolute zero, abstract expressionism—these are just a few of the 5,000 terms that University of Virginia professor E. D. Hirsch Jr. included in his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. This book and his subsequent titles like The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996) influenced much of the educational reform in the United States over the last 20 years.

According to School of Education professor Eugene Provenzo, Hirsch’s body of work spurred the conservative movement and increases in standardized testing—“efforts seen reflected in the implementation of the ‘No Child Left Behind’ legislation of the current Bush administration.”

In his new book, Critical Literacy: What Every American Ought to Know (Paradigm Publishers), Provenzo challenges the exclusionary nature of Hirsch’s list, noting that it emphasizes mainstream American culture and marginalizes female, black, Hispanic, gay, and other minority contributions to our national identity. Provenzo supplies his own list of 5,000 terms—concepts like Axis of Evil, blaxploitation, Cuban Missile Crisis, herstory, and Nintendo thumb—that he says should be taught not as an unexamined list of facts but rather as “a starting point for educated discussions that lead to deeper understanding of our diversity and what it means to be a culturally literate American. It’s one of many lists that might be created.”

It took Provenzo about a year to compile the list, relying heavily on suggestions from students and other word-of-mouth contributors. “Getting the first 4,000 terms was easy,” Provenzo says. “It was the last 1,000 that was the most difficult.”

Known for his creativity and aptitude in multimedia, Provenzo has augmented the release of Critical Literacy with a Web site and a sculptural installation. The installation, which was on display at the 2005 American Educational Studies Association meeting in Charlottesville, North Carolina, is an eight-foot-tall wooden column displaying Hirsch’s 5,000 words pasted to its sides, on top of which are the words Knowledge Is Power and Power Is Knowledge spraypainted in black. “The really fun part of the installation is a digital sound recorder embedded into the hollow part of the pillar that plays my voice gently whispering my list of 5,000 words.”

Students are helping to produce the Web site, www.education.miami.edu/ep/cliteracy, which will link each of Provenzo’s 5,000 terms to Web pages with information on the topic.