EDUC 510: EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
DIXI DOUGHERTY
FALL 2011
Cultural Literacy
Why it is Important to the Field of Education and
Society as a Whole
Annamarie Jones
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Abstract
There has been a noted decline in cultural literacy in America over the last few
decades, and this “decline has occurred at a time when truly functional literacy is
becoming ever more important to our economic well-being” and “providing
everyone with a high level of literacy is important in holding together the social
fabric of the nation” (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil, 2002, p. xii). This paper will attempt
to provide information about who created the idea of cultural literacy, why cultural
literacy is important, why cultural literacy should be taught in schools, and how
teachers can commit to making cultural literacy a part of their class curriculum
while still meeting core curriculum standards.
Keywords
Cultural literacy
Core Knowledge
E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Culture
Student
Communication
Common knowledge
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Cultural literacy refers to the “knowledge of history, contributions, and
perspectives of different cultural groups, including one’s own group, necessary for
understanding of reading, writing, and other media” (Dictionary.com LLC, 2011).
The cultural literacy of a country is referenced in tests and is an essential part of
daily communication between all Americans. Cultural literacy can be considered
the common knowledge of a nation about its culture and the important topics and
events that shape the principles and culture of that nation. “Common knowledge
or collective memory allows people to communicate, to work together, and to live
together. It forms the basis for communities, as if it is shared by enough people, it
is a distinguishing characteristic of a national culture” (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil,
2002, p. x). Although many Americans have never heard of cultural literacy, once
it is described to them, they realize that it is a knowledge set that they use every
day in order to communicate and create lasting relationships with other Americans.
By establishing why cultural literacy is important and how it can be taught by
providing background information about cultural literacy in today’s culture,
hopefully schools will once again begin to adapt cultural literacy into the
curriculum and education of every student.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. was the person that popularized the term “cultural literacy”
and espoused its importance to daily culture. “The idea that reading
comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills, but also wide-ranging
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background knowledge” (The Core Knowledge Foundation, 2011) was the reason
why Hirsch first began to research the affect that cultural literacy has on the
learning and understanding of individuals in a given culture. Hirsch specifies that
“the concept of cultural literacy implies a national culture” (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil,
2002, p. x) because by its very definition, cultural literacy deals with a culture’s
background and common knowledge. Since there are many different cultures,
Hirsch recognized the need to compile and record America’s cultural literacy into a
reference dictionary of topics that every American needs to know in order to add
context not only to communications between people, but also to add context to
written documents.
When researching why some students were able to understand a passage and
others were not, Hirsch “discovered that while the relative readability of a text was
an important factor in determining a student’s ability to comprehend a passage, an
even more important factor was the student’s background knowledge” (The Core
Knowledge Foundation, 2011). This suggests that a student’s background
knowledge can act as a limiting factor when it comes to their ability to understand
and analyze passages and test questions. During the course of his research, Hirsch
also discovered that “African-American students at Richmond community college
could read just as well as University of Virginia students when the topic was
roommates or car traffic, but they could not read passages about Lee’s surrender to
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Grant” (The Core Knowledge Foundation, 2011). What is the difference between
the passages about roommates and Lee’s surrender to Grant? Hirsch stated that the
difference was that the African-American students “had not been taught the various
things that they needed to know to understand ordinary texts addressed to a general
audience” (The Core Knowledge Foundation, 2011). These findings were what led
Hirsch to recognize the need for a compilation of America’s cultural literacy.
Cultural literacy is important to society as a whole, but is even more important to
students who are tested based off of an assumption that they have a general
common knowledge of the American culture.
Students need to be taught cultural literacy early because “if undergraduate
students [in college] have never heard of Gandhi, Orwell, or Thoreau (or have no
reason to remember them), they obviously have such a huge gap in general
knowledge that four years of college education are not likely to make up for what
has been missing since middle school” (Schweizer, 2009, p. 53). Since “there is a
high correlation between students’ reading ability and their ability to learn new
materials in diverse fields” (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil, 2002, p. xiii), students need to
learn cultural literacy early on while they are still able to make connections and
references that will help formulate their learning and understanding of the world
around them. Standardized tests often test a student’s knowledge on a variety of
topics. In the preface to Hirsch’s The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, it is
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stated that “true literacy depends on a knowledge of specific information that is
taken for granted in our public discourse” (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil, 2002, p. xii).
This means that in order for students to be truly literate, they must understand
specific information about references to culture. But the catch is that students may
never learn this specific information because our culture takes it for granted that
everyone should know the reference being made to a specific topic. For example,
someone may assume that referring to “a date which will live in infamy” is
common knowledge in American culture, but this assumes that the entire culture
understands the meaning behind this reference. Many students would not know
that President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the day of the attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy”. Although many in society
would assume that Pearl Harbor is an area of specific knowledge that all
Americans should know about, all Americans do not necessarily know about it,
despite this assumption. The distinction between what should be known and what
is actually known shows why there is a need to teach a common cultural literacy to
students. This is the reason why cultural literacy is so important to students and
society as a whole. Since “learning depends on communication, and effective
communication depends on shared background knowledge” (Hirsch, Kett, &
Trefil, 2002, p. xv), without a common knowledge of American culture,
communication and understanding become all but impossible.
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So, how can such an important concept be taught? Hirsch also believes that
“schools should teach a highly specific curriculum that would allow children to
understand things writers and speakers take for granted, and to fully participate in
democratic life” (The Core Knowledge Foundation, 2011), which is why he
established the Core Knowledge Foundation and the “Core Knowledge Sequence”.
The Core Knowledge Foundation has established a curriculum of cultural literacy
that is grade specific for students in preschool through 8 th grades and uses the Core
Knowledge Sequence as its form of curriculum. The Core Knowledge Sequence is
built off of the simple premise that “knowledge builds on knowledge” and “the
more you know, the more you are able to learn” (The Core Knowledge Foundation,
2011). On the Core Knowledge website, teachers are given free access to PDF
files of the Core Knowledge curriculum for each grade level. “Core Knowledge
curriculum represents a first-of-its kind effort to identify the foundational
knowledge every child need to reach these goals – and to teach it, grade-by-grade,
year-by-year, in a coherent age-appropriate sequence” (The Core Knowledge
Foundation, 2011). This curriculum is successful in teaching cultural literacy
because it is coherent, cumulative, and content-specific. Even in the context of this
curriculum, “teachers are free to devote their energies to creatively planning how
to teach the content to the children in their classrooms” (The Core Knowledge
Foundation, 2011). The Core Knowledge Sequence helps teach cultural literacy
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because “what children are able to learn at any given moment depends on what
they already know – and equally important, that what they know is a function of
previous experience and teaching” (The Core Knowledge Foundation, 2011). This
teaching resource provides teachers with the ability to integrate cultural literacy
into their core curriculum and helps them provide their students with the ability to
build a foundation of general knowledge and understanding of cultural nuances and
references.
Cultural literacy is an issue that is not likely to go away any time soon. With
the popularity of web-based searches increasing each day, students are relying
more and more on their ability to look up or reference material on the internet
rather than actually learning the material, so they have no internal reference of
cultural topics or events. While this may help students write research papers, it
will not help them advance their learning because “as a consequence of the fact
that we learn most easily when we attach the new to the old, people who already
know a lot tend to learn new things faster and more easily than people who do not
know very much” (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil, 2002, p. xiii). Since having a solid
background in knowledge of one’s culture helps facilitate learning and
comprehension, teaching students cultural literacy and teaching the importance of
it to the American society is growing increasingly more important. As the
population of people under thirty remembers less and less of what happened before
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1980, the American society as a whole is losing its cultural identity, which is
affecting its ability to communicate with and understand one another. Cultural
contexts and references are misunderstood and are forgotten, as are many of the
topics and events that have influenced the American culture up to this point.
Although even Hirsch has recognized the limitations of cultural literacy by stating
that “extensive curriculum is not a sufficient basis for education by itself”
(Schweizer, 2009, p. 55) and that “cultural literacy is a necessary but not sufficient
attainment of an educated person” (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil, 2002, p. xvi), cultural
literacy can go a far way towards helping Americans and students contextualize
conversations and general knowledge of cultural topics and events that have
heavily influenced America’s current culture and customs.
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References
Dictionary.com LLC. (2011). Define Cultural Literacy at Dictionary.com. Retrieved from
Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cultural+literacy
Hirsch, E., Kett, J. F., & Trefil, J. (2002). The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (3rd ed.).
New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Schweizer, B. (2009). Cultural Literacy: Is it Time to Revisit the Debate? Thought and Action.
The Core Knowledge Foundation. (2011). Core Knowledge Foundation: About the Curriculum.
Retrieved from The Core Knowledge Foundation: http://www.coreknowledge.org/aboutthe-curriculum
The Core Knowledge Foundation. (2011). Core Knowledge Foundation: E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Retrieved from Core Knowledge Foundation: http://www.coreknowledge.org/ed-hirsch-jr
The Core Knowledge Foundation. (2011). Core Knowledge Foundation: Learn About Us.
Retrieved from The Core Knowledge Foundation: http://www.coreknowledge.org/learnabout-us
The Core Knowledge Foundation. (2011). Core Knowledge Foundation: Sequence. Retrieved
from The Core Knowledge Foundation: http://www.coreknowledge.org/sequence