What is pop and traditional culture ? How would you describe them?

Describe the relationship between media literacy and the responsible consumption of pop culture?

• Answer:

  When asked to define literacy, most people will say that literacy is the ability to read and write in one's own native language. This basic type of literacy is still the gateway to all that formal education has to offer. Without it, one is hard put to function in modern society. Beyond that, it has been argued that no person can be considered to be educated unless he is "culturally literate." In his 1987 bookCultural Literacy, E. D. Hirsch argued that modern education has placed too much emphasis on "process", or cognitive thinking, and tilted too far away from the traditional assumption that all children must learn certain facts, quotations, literature, in order to comprehend what they read and see. (Hirsch, 1987.) For example, any educated English speaking adult was expected to be familiar with certain references to historical figures, mythology, religion, philosophy, and literature that are the core of Western culture, without which he could not decode history or literature or science. Mythology, the Bible, and other great works of literature, philosophy, religion, and science were and ought to remain an important element of education. Process without a common base of prior knowledge, or cultural literacy, handicaps the student to the degree that he must "reinvent the wheel" with every attempt at learning. In fact, this core knowledge is what enabled the common person to "read" a classical painting even if he lacked the ability to read. Today many "educated" people, lacking the core knowledge our ancestors took for granted, cannot look at a painting depicting common historical figures or mythological or Biblical figures without a guide book. In addition to basic information portrayed, common people were capable of recognizing subtleties of painting without conscious decoding.