Lankshear and Knobel Response
Greetings,
As I was reading today, I noted that a gentleman by the name of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. was quoted from his book Cultural Literacy: What every American should know (1987). In this book he argues that there is a list of things that students must know before they can become useful and functioning members of society. I instantly remembered seeing his, shortened, list of items in the Tozer article read last week. I can’t help but returning to this, and think about how people cannot boil down culture down to a simple list. I mean this in two ways, the lack of context, the continual change of a single culture and the viewpoint of different cultures.
As I was looking over the list, I knew what most of the items were. However, if I didn’t, for example, suppose I didn’t know what the “Alien and Sedition Acts” signified. I would naturally look it up in the encyclopedia, or online. If I were to do that I would learn that they were designed to prevent a demagogue from raising a revolution while America is otherwise busy fighting a war. I wouldn’t, from that definition, know how to apply that to current events and ideas. This is what I mean by a lack of context. In order to understand the significance of the Alien and Sedition Acts, I would have to also learn about the XYZ affair, War of 1812, and the American Constitution. If we, as teachers, focused on just the list, all we would get as a society would be automatons with information but no way of applying that information in a useful manner.
As we all know, culture changes over time. Worldwide Capitalism, MTV, and the Internet all affect the change of culture and the diffusion of ideas quicker than ever before. Previously closed societies like France, Russia, and China now drink American soft drinks like Coca-Cola, listen to American music, and news is transmitted instantaneously. All of these has changed the face of cultures worldwide. It is due to this ability of cultures to change rapidly I believe that the attempts to boil down the “essentials” of a culture down to a list would only be effective (if it is effective at all) until the next cultural revolution comes, or some new technology affects how we as Americans work, play, or even think.
Finally, the viewpoint of different cultures affects the idea that there can be a list, because each culture would have its own list. A person from China would have an incredibly different list than a person from America, for obvious reasons. With the rise of the internet, and news channels such as CNN and FOX, the world news stage has shrunk, and thus the different “lists” from each culture must either be shrunk or combined in order for a person from America to understand news from China, as well as why it is happening.
In short, I believe that this idea of a list in order to understand the news and other cultural phenomena is at best flawed, and at worst an obsolete way of understanding the world around us.
Readings:
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). From ‘reading’ to the ‘new literacy studies’ In New literacies (pp. 3-49). New York: Open University Press.
