Why is Cultural Literacy important?

With an ever evolving education system and the influx of multicultural students its important to be culturally aware of the student. No student is the same as the other and should not be taught as if they are all the same students. Thier knowledge about themselves and others is not the same and it should be developed. An awareness needs to made in the classroom to include all aspects of students, culture, and history. One may say that making this kind of awareness is unnessary. Yet it is nessecary to make students aware and to decipher and destroy harmful stereotypes, offer students the oppourtunity to see the truth in thier own eyes, and to  show students the world beyond thier own.

In the 1980's Dr. E.D. Hirsch developed the idea of cultural literacy. After two brief studies and his findings of the studies he concluded that reading comprehension not only included decoding skills but students also need a wide range of background cultural knowledge in order to understand what was being taught by thier teachers. However, the problem was not just with nuetral and bias text it was also because teachers themselves are not culturally aware.

The current education system of that time was letting students down and only catered to a select group of people. Our school systems neglected to expound on knowledge and include text that was shared by all. If we strived to attend to students on a cultural basis to develop a diverse background knowledge. Teacher should teach about other cultures and through diferentiated instruction all students from every culture can be reached.