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Je CAN Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development
With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W. Richardson Foundation

 

 

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CULTURAL LITERACY

A few years ago I was conducting some experiments to measure the effectiveness of a piece of writing when it
is read by real audiences under controlled conditions. One memorable day my experiment took me to some
students at a community college, and my complacency about adult literacy was forever shattered! This
community college was located in Richmond, Virginia, and you will grasp the irony of the location in a moment.
Our first experiments went well, because we started out by giving the students a paper to read on the topic of
"friendship." When they were reading about friendship, these students showed themselves, on average, to be
literate. But that changed with the next piece of writing that we asked them to read. It was a comparison of the
characters of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and the students’ performance on that task was, to be blunt
about it, illiterate. Our results showed that Grant and Lee simply were not familiar names to these young adults
in the capital of the Confederacy!

Shortly after having that disorienting experience, I discovered that Professor Richard Anderson of the Center
for Reading Research in Urbana, Illinois, and other researchers in psycholinguistics throughout the world had
reached some firm conclusions about the importance of background knowledge in reading. For instance, in one
experiment Anderson and his colleagues discovered that an otherwise literate audience in India could not
properly read a simple text about an American wedding. But by the same token, an otherwise literate audience
in America could not properly read a simple text about an Indian wedding. Why not? It wasn’t a matter of
vocabulary, or phonics or word recognition; it was a matter of background knowledge, of cultural literacy.
Anderson and others have shown that to read a text with understanding one needs to have the background
knowledge that the author has tacitly assumed the reader to have. Back in the 18th century, when mass literacy
was beginning to be a reality in Great Britain, Dr. Johnson invoked a personage whom he called "the common
reader" as the possessor of the background knowledge that a writer can tacitly assume readers in the larger
culture to have. Similarly, in present day America, the common reader needs to have what | am calling
"cultural literacy" in order to read general materials with understanding. Research has shown that this
background knowledge is a fundamental requirement for meaningful literacy.

To give you an example of the need for cultural literacy, I shall quote a snippet:

A federal appeals panel today upheld an order barring foreclosure on a Missouri farm, saying
that U.S. Agriculture Secretary John R. Block has reneged on his responsibilities to some debt
ridden farmers. The appeals panel directed the USDA to create a system of processing loan
deferments and of publicizing them as it said Congress had intended. The panel said that it is
the responsibility of the agriculture secretary to carry out this intent ' not as a private banker, but
as a public broker. ' (The Washington Post, December 29, 1983, p. A-13)

Imagine that item being read by persons who have been trained in phonics and so on, but who are culturally
illiterate. They might know words like "foreclosure," but they would not understand the text as a whole. Who
gave the order that the federal panel upheld? What is a federal appeals panel? Even if culturally illiterate
readers bothered to look up individual words, they would not have much idea of the reality being referred to.

Thomas Jefferson said that he would prefer newspapers without government to government without
newspapers. He thought that the very concept of American democracy, depending as it does on all citizens
having a vote, requires an informed citizenry and universal literacy. On Jefferson's principles, we might venture
this definition of the background information that an American citizen ought to have in order to be truly literate:
It is "the background information required to read serious American newspapers and magazines with
understanding." This knowledge would include political, proverbial, historical, and scientific information as
part of the general background knowledge that I am calling "cultural literacy."

One reason that we as a nation have hesitated to make a collective decision about the background knowledge
that Americans should know is that we object to such decisions being dictated to us from on high. We govern
our schools through more than twenty thousand independent school districts, each of which decides or fails to
decide such matters for itself, and which imposes or fails to impose its decisions on students and teachers. But

 

Kor Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712