Mono-cultural vs. Multicultural Literacy (flash movie)

[59] How do humans make meaning out of written language and how does cultural knowledge limit and advance literacy for Americans whose backgrounds are not dominated by the mono-cultural, Western humanist tradition? The list enforces a kind of crippled, cultural literacy.

[60] Prescriptions for cultural literacy have entered the larger debates surrounding education, race, and liberal politics in the form of a conservative attack on the term multiculturalism.

[61] Worse yet, uncommon knowledge, the knowledges of peoples, traditions, economic classes and women which are unrecorded or under-recorded in the great books of Western civilization and their corollaries, represents a structural problem because there is, at the moment, no clear answer to the question: how to collate disparate, often contradictory notions arising from the immense diversity of world views represented in these excluded epistemologies?

[62] Cultural diversity, deep contextualization of knowledge are at issue when we discuss Hirsch's examination of the language of The Black Panther. Praising it for its "conservatism in literate knowledge and spelling" (CL,1987, 23) and citing this as evidence of mainstream cultural literacy, Hirsch points out that this revolutionary newspaper was not only meticulously edited but deployed common cultural terminology such as "free and indivisible," "milk and honey," "law and order," "bourgeois democracy," and the first five-hundred words of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence without attribution. What he does not note is the ironic nature of the use of these terms or that they were often bracketed by quotation marks. What Hirsch does not do is include Black Panther in his list of what literate Americans know or as an entry in his dictionary. Hirsch is happy for Patterson's support, but he does not take Patterson's description of a dynamic culture in dialectic seriously. If he did, he would have placed his examination of the Black Panther party's newspaper within context as part of an American cultural revolution. Instead, he treats its product as severed from mainstream culture except insofar as it uses its language. The Black Panthers remain an accessory after the fact. Cultural literacy is a one way street for Hirsch. His analysis of The Black Panther's text is superficial and self-serving. Earlier he admits that "the explicit words [of a text] are just surface pointers to textual meaning in reading and writing," something I have described previously, but when it comes to this instance, he feels free to point to the linguistic conservatism of this revolutionary newspaper without attention to the sophisticated ironies deliberately present in the periodical's use of "conservative" cultural markers. "Free and indivisible" and phrases like it are indeed "just surface pointers to textual meaning." Anyone reading this periodical without cultural and historical context would indeed misread it drastically. By page eighteen, Hirsch is staking out a territory which marginalizes "multicultural education" and valorizes "American literate culture" without the least critical awareness of a "wider literacy" which is already multicultural.

[63] Another serious problem concerns the denied status of individuals who have not had the "opportunity" of growing up within the canonized cultural tradition. Research in the social class basis of literacy has pointed out that the home is a crucial setting for the acquisition of many skills that are necessarily a part of literacy. These skills are bound up in cultural experience, but are not taught by schools and indeed may not even be possible to teach in anything resembling a traditional school curriculum. Shirley Brice Heath describes the explicit transmission of specific skills in the middle class home as crucial to the development of certain school behaviors and skills. Working class families often explicitly teach attitudes and behavior which contradicts the assumptions of some school methodology. For example, exhortations from parents to "always tell the truth" can be a problem for working class students who are asked in the school setting to imagine and create out of fantasy. There are probably thousands of analogous pitfalls.