We begin this study with a personal anecdote by one of the authors of this book:
A few years ago I travelled to Antwerp for a conference. It was a long journey from Australia (as most journeys that start in Australia are wont to be, unless one is going to New Zealand). A 14-hour flight from Melbourne to Dubai, followed by a 4-hour layover; seven hours from Dubai to Amsterdam, a train ride from Amsterdam to Belgium, and then the taxi to the hotel. At this point you probably would forgive me for being tired, jet-lagged, and quite possibly, delusional.As most frequent travellers know, the best way to stave off jet-lag is not to give in to sleep, no matter how tempting. So, after dropping off my bags and taking a shower I went for a walk. Strolling around a new city is usually exciting enough to keep me awake, but I got lost looking at the fold-out map, trying to find the Rubens Museum. Instead, I found myself in one of the busiest shopping strips in Antwerp, before a storefront that announced itself as a proud purveyor of “Australian Home Made Ice Cream”, no less.Intrigued, I went in. I was born and raised in Mexico, not Australia, but I had become a naturalised Australian a few years prior, after falling in love with the many wonders offered by the country, while fully unaware that ice cream was one of them. I was greeted by a smiling shop attendant. Somehow, we managed to strike up a conversation in an unholy pidgin of French, Bengali, Dutch, Spanish and English. The attendant explained that he was half Belgian, half Indian. He grew up in Bengal, and halfway through his studies in dentistry he decided to become an engineer. He moved to Belgium to study for his engineering degree. On weekends he worked at this shop, making the authentic, Australian ice cream he had just sold to the Mexican-Australian. In Antwerp.
The most remarkable element about this anecdote is that it is not remarkable at all. With increasing frequency we come across colleagues or acquaintances with cultural or disciplinary backgrounds that may be completely different from our own, people who hail from the most remote corners of the Earth (e.g. Australia), for whom one’s well-known, perfectly “normal” turf may seem entirely unfamiliar. The skills, knowledge and abilities involved in understanding and interpreting these differences, and learning how to approach them as potential sources of richness in intercultural and interdisciplinary collaborations, is what we refer to as cultural literacy, which is the main subject of this book.
1.1 The Origins of “Cultural Literacy”
The term cultural literacy is not new, and it is important to establish where we stand in relation to previous approaches. E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, published in 1989, became the topic of much debate in education. Even though the term “culture wars” would not be popularised until 1991, with the publication of James Davison Hunter’s influential book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, the “war of cultures” was already being waged in the United States, and Hirsch’s book was fresh ammunition, particularly after his ideas were championed by Dr William Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education during the president’s second administration. This was a dubious honour for Hirsch, a self-professed progressive (Hirsch 2015).
Hirsch’s purported progressiveness, however, is often obtuse in his writings. Cultural Literacy opens by identifying a major problem in the American education system: literacy rates, which had been rising in the “developed world” in the 1980s, had plateaued in the United States. According to Hirsch, there was a direct relationship between the lack of growth in the number of literate Americans and the concepts that schoolchildren were being taught in school. He argued that if schools taught important knowledge that is central to national culture, this would result not only in higher literacy rates, but an increase in students’ ability to learn across every subject. Their capacity to contextualise would be enhanced, which would in turn allow students to learn new information and knowledge with greater ease (Hirsch 1989b, 456). Hirsch refers to this important core cultural knowledge as cultural literacy, which he defines alternatively as “a universally shared national vocabulary” and “the shared culture of the common reader” (1989b, 26, 36). It is the “background information” we possess, which allows us “to take up a newspaper and read it with an adequate level of comprehension, getting the point, grasping the implications” (1989a, 2). Simply put, linguistic literacy is dependent on, and directly related to this conceptual, cultural literacy.
This communal core knowledge, Hirsch argues, extends across every field and medium, including sports, science, arts, literature, film, television and classical and contemporary texts. It is often assumed that once they become linguistically literate, students will be able to grasp this basic cultural canon, but according to Hirsch, the evidence has proved the contrary, and consequently, pedagogical measures must be taken to address this problem. Due to this ignorance of core cultural concepts, schoolchildren have been unable to understand the basic workings of society, which poses long-term problems if they are to become its future leaders and custodians (Hirsch 1989a, 7). With an early interest in interdisciplinarity, Hirsch argued that cooperation between professionals from different disciplines and backgrounds was crucial for further social advancement, “If we do not achieve a literate society, the technicians, with their arcane specialties, will not be able to communicate with us nor us with them. That would contradict the basic principles of democracy, and must not be allowed to happen” (1989, 31) Hirsch was stressing the importance of being able to go beyond the boundaries of one’s own discipline in order to engage in a dialogue with others. Like Hirsch, in this book we strongly support interdisciplinarity, but our approach is markedly different from his. As we shall discuss later on, instead of proposing a standardisation of knowledge, we propose a modus operandi of openness to different types of knowledge.
Hirsch repeatedly argues that increased cultural literacy is wholly to the advantage of minorities and the poor, that it is not the property of any particular social group or stratum (1989a, 11). He states that “literate culture is the most democratic culture in our land: it excludes nobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes; it is not usually one’s first culture, but it should be everyone’s second, existing as it does beyond the narrow spheres of family, neighbourhood, and region” (1989a, 21). This is where Hirsch’s arguments start to become contradictory. The core cultural information that Hirsch argues is “the most democratic” in the land is broadly associated with the American upper-middle class (1989a, 19). As he argues that this information is open to all, he also asserts that the degree to which minorities and marginalised members of society are able to become culturally literate, will determine their ability to escape the cycle of poverty and thrive in society. Clearly then, cultural literacy is not as democratic and inclusive as Hirsch suggests if minorities and marginalised members of society do not have access to it to begin with. In an article published in 1985, “Cultural Literacy Does Not Mean Core Curriculum”, Hirsch discusses the members of the “club” who traditionally have access to cultural literacy in the United States:
To make the idea of cultural literacy explicit is therefore to issue an open invitation to not yet fully literate people, inviting them to join the company of literate people. I say open invitation because in the past, knowledge about cultural literacy has been closed off and restricted to those who have already belonged to the club. In the normal course of things, literate people can become members of the club only after years of reading and conversation with other literate people … In the past, people outside the club might have wished for a more efficient way to acquire this shared background information, but they have lacked a guide. My article was just a first step in calling attention to the importance of the shared information that literate Americans take for granted. Once we are conscious of the fact of cultural literacy, and of the importance to disadvantaged people of our not keeping a knowledge of its finite contents the exclusive secret of the well educated, perhaps some excluded members of our society will be more encouraged to become members of the literacy club. (1985, 48)
As Hirsch accurately points out, the problems and ramifications of illiteracy go beyond the inability to read and write or to do so poorly. An illiterate person is unable to partake fully in society (1989a, 12). Thus, Hirsch’s long-term goal was that all American citizens would become culturally literate, that they could pick up any piece of writing, or watch any television show written for “the average person”, and understand what it was about (1989a, xvi, 12). His intention was to empower schoolchildren of marginalised backgrounds by giving them access to the canon of literate American culture. His contention is that in so doing, their linguistic literacy would improve, they would become better readers, writers and communicators and they could reap the rewards of knowing how to operate efficiently in a liberal Western democracy like the United States; essentially, they would know how to “play the game”. As Cook puts it, in Hirsch’s view, through cultural literacy American schoolchildren would eventually be prepared to “engage productively in political discourse and join in the ongoing democratic conversation of the United States” (Cook 2009, 487).
On the one hand Hirsch suggests that cultural literacy is available to all, but on the other he argues that it has traditionally been the privilege of only a chosen few, and that it should be made available to all, as a form of empowerment. What Hirsch fails to address are the systemic reasons why cultural literacy has not been available to everyone and how allowing minorities and other disenfranchised groups to “join the club” does not necessarily change the club’s rules, but may, in fact, perpetuate them. What biases, unconscious or not, have affected the club’s workings and identity? In order to promote cultural literacy effectively Hirsch wanted to create a national canon that would encompass all the information culturally literate Americans should be acquainted with. He advocates “tolerance” of multiculturalism in education, but stresses that this should not be its aim. According to him, the primary responsibility of schools is acculturation (1989a, xviii). He further argues that “to teach the ways of one’s own community has always been and still remains the essence of the education of our children, who enter neither a narrow tribal culture nor a transcendent world culture but a national literate culture. For profound historical reasons, this is the way of the modern world” (1989a, 1...