The Importance Of Music And Cultural Literacy

From a young age we were all told that literacy is the ability to read and write. That reading and writing was the most important skill to have in order to be success. However, growing up I defined literacy as being able to express yourself and having the knowledge in whatever field you chose to do it in. If I didn 't know how to read, but I had a passion for music that does not mean I am illiterate. It simply means I am music literate. The world put a negative connotation on the word literacy, resulting in ignorance to the real meaning of the word. In whatever area a person specializes in that makes them literate to that area, whether it be dance, music, art or even fishing. It wasn 't until after I read Knoblauch 's ideas on the different …show more content…
I agree that "true literacy is more than technical proficiency"(4). Going back to my idea that literacy is being proficient in an area, cultural literacy is being able to fluently understand a culture. For that to happen, it doesn 't mean you have to know how to read or write. Many cultures who don 't know how to read or write learn about their ancestors through stories and drawings. I think the idea of passing traditions and values down from generation to generation is a great way to learn about your culture. To me, cultural literacy is better than functional ,but it has one major flaw that stops me from completely agreeing. I am not fond of the ideas of social purity. Cultural literacy allows other cultures to be closed mined to one another. They see their culture as more important than another because that 's all they …show more content…
From what I gathered and from what we discussed in class, critical literacy is looking at society through a critical lens. Critical literacy looks like it would be a great idea due to the fact that it expresses and explains different traditions. However, a person or a group of people can come up with all these great ideas for change, but since there is no power behind them all they have is great ideas. In my opinion, critical literacy is more in favor of the highly educated and goes hand in hand with functional literacy. People who usually confine in critical and functional are people with some sort of power.
The last argument Knoblauch stated is literacy as personal growth. I tend to get the ideas in personal growth and cultural literacy mixed up. The reason being that they both promote progress through individual learners. Similar to liberal literacy, I agree that people should have expressive freedom. It allows an individual to grow as a person and in their own individual imagination. Unlike critical literacy, I agree with liberal literacy because it often speaks on behalf of those who are overlooked or those of