Cultural Literacy

Cultural Literacy and General Education

Cultural literacy as conceptualized by Hirsch relates to one's ability to participate in one's culture at a highly competent level. As such, many view this definition of cultural literacy as having roots in anthropological notions of culture. That is, culture is defined as the shared meanings, values, behaviors, expectations, and beliefs, among other things, that people living in the same society participate in. As such, to be literate in one's culture assumes a shared experience and understanding of that culture and an ability to draw on and extend from that shared understanding when communicating with others of the same culture. The shared communication and understanding are based on the notion of the schema. A schema is a person's sense of what is happening, and what should happen, based on past experience and knowledge. New schémas may be created from [Page 172]existing ones by expanding or linking them to create new meaning. In this sense, schémas are rooted in the individual and form the basis of one's understanding of the world. However, schémas also exist on a cultural level, and a shared understanding of cultural schémas is the basis of the concept of cultural literacy. For example, jokes about public figures, sports teams, or other cultural icons make sense only to people who are familiar with those icons—people who share those cultural schema. When people living in the same society do not share cultural understanding, communication between them is limited and thereby limiting to those whose cultural knowledge is narrow and/or different from others. Cultural communication is most effective when all participants share the same knowledge and understand cultural schémas in the same or similar ways.

The cultural literacy movement sparked by Hirsch's book was an attempt to address a perceived lack of general shared cultural knowledge in U.S. society. However, the shared cultural knowledge he assumed many Americans lacked was modeled on a Western, classical, and traditional educational foundation seen as belonging mainly to upper-middle-class, White males, which many define as the mainstream of American culture. One of the outcomes of the movement was the creation of a series of lists of what every American should know (sometimes referred to in subsequent debates as Hirsch's “canon”). Critics of the cultural literacy movement contend that the United States is a plural or at least multicultural society and that there is no single culture, but rather multiple cultures all with their shared understandings and schémas. Advocates for the multicultural understanding of U.S. society claim that cultural literacy unfairly privileges the Western canon at the expense of other coexisting cultural heritages.

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