Cultural Literacy: What Every American Need To Know

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Globalization has brought a change not only in the economic, social and technological order but also in the mentalities of people and the ways they need to interact with the world around them. There has been a consensus that in our increasingly interconnected world, one of the essential tasks of educators and institutions at all levels is to develop, promote and enhance cultural literacy. In the wake of discussions about the era of "post-globalisation", the relevance of being culturally literate started to be questioned. This paper reviews the literature on cultural literacy and clarifies some of the conceptual ideas surrounding the construct. It presents new core elements of cultural literacy relevant to the 2020s. A critical assessment of …show more content…
Hirsh published his influential book “Cultural Literacy: What every American need to know”, in which his concept of the cultural literacy refers to the ability to participate fluently in a given culture by understanding a given culture's signs and symbols, including its language, particular dialectic, stories, entertainment, idioms, idiosyncrasies, culturally-conditioned allusions, references to past events, idiomatic expressions, jokes, names, places and so on (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil, 1988, 2002). Hirsh’s definition of cultural literacy is culture-specific. You are culturally literacy when you know what an average member of the same culture is supposed to know. This is usually assumed and often unstated (Hirsch, 1988). He compiled 23 sections including World History, American History, Business, Science, Literature, Mathematics and Technology and a list of dates which he “intended to illustrate the character and range of the knowledge literate Americans tend to share”(p. …show more content…
(Mayo, 2003, quated in Tucker, Bonial, Vanhove, & Kedharnath, 2014). Furthermore, cultural literacy has begun to be seen as a “modus operandi” (Garcia Ochoa, McDonald, & Monk, 2016) that “highlights communication, comparison and critique, bringing ideas together in an interdisciplinary and international collaboration” (Segal, Kancewicz-Hoffman, Landfester, 2013, p.4). In addition to this, Cultural Literacy is claimed to have the same implications as Opportunity Cost in economics and “can be applied and verified through everyday experience, in any and every context” (Garcia Ochoa et al., 2016, p.1). In agreement with this, Desmond, K. J., Stahl, S. A., & Graham (2011) give their definition of cultural literacy as “the knowledge of history, contributions, and perspectives of different cultural groups, including one's own group, necessary for an understanding of reading, writing, and other media”. To build communication, acceptance, and understanding, one needs to possess and to use a broad range of general knowledge. Cultural literacy requires interaction with culture and reflection on it (Desmond et al.
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