We are experiencing a literacy breakdown which is unlike anything I know of in the history of letters. Next is the problem of cultural illiteracy. This term describes students who can read but are unable to thrive in the modern world because they lack the information necessary to interpret the material they read. Dr. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is the most prominent thinker associated with this concept of cultural illiteracy. Both he and Nash charge that modern educational theory deserves much of the blame for causing cultural illiteracy.
Educators are more interested in how children learn rather than what they learn.
Because of this belief, children fail to store away enough information to become culturally literate. Educators will grudgingly admit to the problem of functional and cultural literacy, and even assume some of the blame, but they are proud of the decline in what Nash calls moral illiteracy . Nash sees the problem of moral illiteracy as a cultural war between those who are religious and support traditional values and those who are secular and advocate anti-traditional or modernist values. Those in the midst of the battle understand this conflict, while the typical American does not. The problem of moral illiteracy is not evident only to evangelical Christians.