(FORTUNE Magazine) – The arresting new idea out there is something called ''cultural literacy,'' and it is all spelled out in a best-selling book by E. D. Hirsch Jr. bearing that title and subtitled What Every American Needs to Know.'' As the latter phrase implies, Hirsch is arguing that in many ways the information a people share is as great a bond as their common language. The book bemoans the enormous gaps in Americans' knowledge and worries extensively about high school seniors who cannot identify Grant or Lee, who do not have the foggiest idea when Christopher Columbus set out for the New World or when the First World War took place, and -- an especially hilarious detail -- cannot believe that the Latin they're being forced to study is a dead language. (On getting the bad news about Latin, Hirsch reports, one skeptical student demanded to know: ''What do they speak in Latin America?'') In a fascinating 64-page appendix, the book lists several thousand names, places, dates, and phrases that the author believes should be familiar to just about all adult Americans. We had a lot of fun reading Cultural Literacy and yet insist on bringing a couple of negative thoughts to Hirsch's schema. For openers, the problem as he describes it is essentially insoluble because it reflects some serious limitations of the American people. With respect to these people, a frequently underrated fact of truly awesome significance, when you think about it, is that just about half of them have IQs of less than 100. Hirsch appears to believe that the root cause of cultural illiteracy is bad schooling, especially the ''educational formalism'' that emphasizes reading and other skills but is oblivious to the content of education. His solution begins and ends with curriculum reform. Utterly ignored in his presentation is any awareness of the relationship between somebody's intelligence and his fund of general information. The best predictor of your own fund is not the curriculum at your school; it is your IQ. Results for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (a standard IQ test) show powerful correlations, averaging around 0.75, between the general information subtest and the mental ability being measured on the rest of the WAIS. People who think analytically, and therefore understand the relationships between different facts, end up retaining a lot more facts. So we deem it futile to look to the day when all Americans will be familiar with the entries on Hirsch's 64-page list. A more practical approach would be to compose lists of things that should be meaningful to particular groups of Americans. Take neoconservative intellectuals, for example. We happen to know many of these folks personally and believe that every last one of them can speak authoritatively to the following 20 names, places, and phrases, and therefore will not have to check the answers on page 134: (1) Woodstock (the typewriter, not the festival); (2) Order No. 4; (3) The 1956 ''secret speech''; (4) Amaretto and cream; (5) Julius Hammer; (6) Mark Rudd; (7) Brian Weber; (8) Krasnoyarsk; (9) There's no such thing as a free lunch; (10) Gender Gap; (11) Generation Gap; (12) Killer rabbit; (13) Helen Gahagan Douglas; (14) Henry Manne; (15) John Zaccaro; (16) Magadan (the place, not the New York Mets' infielder); (17) Swann; (18) Law of unintended consequences; (19) Clark Amendment; (20) Mugged by reality.

Right-Wing Answers (1) Machine on which Alger Hiss typed documents for transmission to Soviet espionage ring; (2) 1970 affirmative-action order, signed by Labor Secretary George Shultz, initiating ''goals and timetables'' for government contractors; (3) Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin's atrocities; (4) What Ham Jordan allegedly threw at a girl in a Washington bar; (5) Armand's father, a pioneer in the American Communist movement; (6) Led the 1968 revolution at Columbia University; (7) Reverse discrimination victim of 1979 Supreme Court decision; (8) Site of Soviet phased-array radar violative of the ABM Treaty; (9) Milton Friedman's reminder that government-bestowed benefits always have hidden costs; (10) Alleged disdain for Reagan by women in the 1980 and 1984 elections; (11) Alleged difference in values between kids of the Sixties and their parents; (12) It attacked Jimmy Carter in a canoe in 1979; (13) Liberal actress-politician famous for being labeled a fellow traveler (which she was) by Nixon when he defeated her in 1950; (14) Academic who has spent years trying to teach free-market economics to judges; (15) a.k.a. Mr. Geraldine Ferraro; (16) Forced-labor zone in Siberia mainly famous for 1944 visit in which Henry Wallace remarked on the splendid working conditions; (17) 1971 Supreme Court decision initiating the era of forced busing; (18) Explains why all government programs work out wrong; (19) Until 1985 repeal, banned U.S. aid for anti-Communist rebels in Angola; (20) Irving Kristol's famous explanation of how liberals become neoconservatives.