Cultural Literacy

Debated: the idea covers signs, symbols and stories, and what content counts is contested.

Not necessarily, and that is one of the debated points. The term was coined by the American educator and literary critic E. D. Hirsch as an analogy to ordinary literacy: a culturally literate person knows a culture's signs and symbols, including its language, stories, entertainment and idioms, and can talk to and understand others from that culture with fluency. What counts as the right knowledge is contested. Discussions of the idea raise a content question, which asks what kinds of knowledge matter, such as facts, names and dates or less tangible experiences like having heard a particular song. They also raise a minority question, which asks whether cultural literacy is part of the hegemony of the dominant culture, and a multicultural question, which asks which culture is meant.