Hirsch, as an authority on reading and writing, is concerned with traditional texts. But his point about background knowledge and the content of our shared public culture extends well beyond schoolbooks. They are applicable to the “texts” of everyday life, in commercial culture, in sports talk, in religious language, in politics. In all cases, we become literate in patterns—“schema” is the academic word Hirsch uses. We come to recognize bundles of concept and connotation like “Party of Lincoln.” We perceive those patterns of meaning the same way a chess master reads an in-game chessboard or the way a great baseball manager reads an at bat. And in all cases, pattern recognition requires literacy in particulars.