86 CHAPteR 4 | FRom IdentIFyIng Issues to FoRmIng QuestIonsFor example, if you were to take a picture of friends in front of the
football stadium on campus, you would focus on what you would most
like to remember — your friends’ faces — blurring the images of the people
walking behind your friends. Setting up the picture, or framing it, might
require using light and shade to make some details stand out more than
others. Writers do the same with language.
E. D. Hirsch uses the concept of cultural literacy to frame his argu-
ment for curricular reform. For Hirsch, the term is a benchmark, a stan-
dard: People who are culturally literate are familiar with the body of
infor mation that every educated citizen should know. Hirsch’s implica-
tion, of course, is that people who are not culturally literate are not well
educated. But that is not necessarily true. In fact, a number of educa-
tors insist that literacy is simply a means to an end — reading to com-
plete an assignment, for example, or to understand the ramifications of a
decision — not an end in itself. By defining and using cultural literacy as
the goal of education, Hirsch is framing his argument; he is bringing his
ideas into focus.
When writers use framing strategies, they also call attention to the
specific conversations that set up the situation for their arguments. Fram-
ing often entails quoting specific theories and ideas from other authors
and then using those quotations as a perspective, or lens, through which
to examine other material. In his memoir Hunger of Memory: The Edu-
cation of Richard Rodriguez (1982), Richard Rodriguez uses this method
to examine his situation as a nonnative speaker of English desperate to
enter the mainstream culture, even if it means sacrificing his identity as
the son of Mexican immigrants. Reflecting on his life as a student, Rodri-
guez comes across Richard Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy (1957).
Hoggart’s de scription of “the scholarship boy” presents a lens through
which Rodriguez can see his own experience. Hoggart writes:
With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy, the family’s con-
solation in feeling public alienation. Lavish emotions texture home life. Then,
at school, the instruction bids him to trust lonely reason primarily. Immediate
needs set the pace of his parents’ lives. From his mother and father the boy
learns to trust spontaneity and nonrational ways of knowing. Then, at school,
there is mental calm. Teachers emphasize the value of a reflectiveness that
opens a space between thinking and immediate action.
Years of schooling must pass before the boy will be able to sketch the
cultural differences in his day as abstractly as this. But he senses those dif-
ferences early. Perhaps as early as the night he brings home an assignment
from school and finds the house too noisy for study. He has to be more and
more alone, if he is going to “get on.” He will have, probably unconsciously,
to oppose the ethos of the hearth, the intense gregariousness of the working-
class family group.... The boy has to cut himself off mentally, so as to do his
homework, as well as he can.
Here is Rodriguez’s response to Hoggart’s description of the scholar-
ship boy:04_GRE_60141_Ch4_080_105.indd 86 10/30/14 7:46 AM