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 From being familiar with street signs to knowing historical reference to understanding the most recent slang, literacy demands interaction with the culture and reflection of it.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 or the "Core Knowledge" movement stresses the knowledge of those pieces of information which content creators will assume the audience already possesses.
Seminal works such as E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know attempt to codify this fast changing set of base standards. Information necessary crosses chronological and geographical boundaries but acts to unite people in one cultural framework.
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