Cultural Literacy

To writers, education is an important factor. Being well educated helps to communicate and associate with other people or peers. Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch’s and Literacies of Power by Donaldo Macedo’s view points in being literate are important. The means of how to be educated differs between E.D. Hirsch, who favors Western Culture, and Donaldo Macedo, who favors the underlying causes to get the truth and nothing but the whole truth out. Donaldo Macedo explains the reason why E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy is not right for us. Hirsch’s aim is to enhance the literacy of children, have mature literacy for all the citizens and hopes to contribute to making that information the possession of all Americans. Hirsch believes all of this can be accomplished through Western Culture and background information. Basically Hirsch is saying our performance level on how we interact needs to increase. We need to learn the same things, have common and basic knowledge to help us communicate efficiently with one another. Macedo on the other hand focuses on oppression, racism and multiculturalism. He also points out what Western Culture teachings would do to us. Macedo’s goal is to inform everyone about the truth and expose the lies that humans were not taught. According to Macedo, if we learn just the same things, we wouldn’t be able to know both sides, we would just learn one side and every story has two sides. It’s like when people get into fights both party sides differs in why the fight started. Both have different ideas but the common goal; to fix the educational system people learn, to increase literate rates, and help citizens communicate with eachother.
Why is literacy so important? According to Hirsch some of the simple reasons which consists of the need to fill out forms or get a good job, other complex reasons may include the cooperation of many people with different specialties in different places. If communication fails so does the ability to comprehend with