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'Cultural literacy' is the ability to converse fluently in the idioms, allusions and informal content which creates and constitutes a dominant culture. From being familiar with street signs to knowing historical reference to understanding the most recent slang, literacy demands interaction with the culture and reflection of it. A knowledge of a canonical set of literature is not valuable when engaging with others in a society if the knowledge stops at the end of the text — as life is interwoven with art, expression, history and experience, cultural literacy requires the broad range of trivia and the use of that trivia in the creation of a communal language and a "groupthink." Cultural literacy stresses the knowledge of those pieces of information which content creators will assume the audience already possesses.

Contents

See also

Further reading

External links

See also

★ Cultural competence

★ Educational essentialism

Further reading

★ Cultural literacy: what every American needs to know, E. D. Hirsch Jr., , , Houghton Mifflin, 1987, ISBN 0-395-43095-X

★ Christenbury, Leila "Cultural Literacy: A Terrible Idea Whose Time Has Come" ''The English Journal'' '78'.1 (January 1989), pp. 14-17.

★ Broudy, Harry S. "Cultural Literacy and General Education" ''Journal of Aesthetic Education'' '24'.1, (Special Issue: Cultural Literacy and Arts Education,Spring, 1990), pp. 7-16.

★ Anson, Chris M. "Book Lists, Cultural Literacy, and the Stagnation of Discourse" ''The English Journal'' '77'.2 (February 1988), pp. 14-18.

★ Zurmuehlen, Marilyn "Serious Pursuit of Cultural Trivialization" ''Art Education'' '42'.6 (November 1989), pp. 46-49.

★ Simpson, Alan "The Uses of "Cultural Literacy": A British View" ''Journal of Aesthetic Education'' '25'.4, 25th Anniversary Issue Winter, 1991), pp. 65-73.

★ Reedy, Jeremiah "Cultural Literacy and the Classics" ''The Classical Journal'' '84'.1 (October 1988), pp. 41-46.

★ Murray, Denise E. ''Diversity as Resource. Redefining Cultural Literacy'' (Alexandria, Virginia) 1994.

External links

★ The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy

★ Free Cultural Literacy Tests

★ Cultural Literacy blog

★ Dialogue A journal for Cultural Literacy