Knowing such information is the decisive skill of reading. 1 Hirsch demonstrates what he means through a number of telling illustrations. One has to do with a brief essay about the meeting between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.2 The passage is not especially difficult to read. But it caused a group of community college students great difficulty when they attempted to understand it. They didn t know, for example, that Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were the chief generals for the Northern and Southern armies during America s Civil War.
Many didn t know what the Civil War had been about.
They didn t know when it had been fought. They had no idea why Lee and Grant met at Appomattox Courthouse. In short, they had no contextual map into which they could put the load of new information about which they were reading. We can t make sense of what we read, Hirsch says, unless we have a mental map into which we can place the words and their meanings. Again, he uses an example.