Reddit mentions of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

I think your student may be borrowing ideas from E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, seen partially here - which is frequently cited in literacy debates. So then I wonder if he's taking his ideas from E.D. Hirsch, Jr's several best-selling books on "cultural literacy" (like Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know). It does sound quite similar to what he describes in the small paragraph you've given us.

For example: Hirsch contends that "literacy is more than just the actual mechanics of reading. Literacy means understanding what you read and to understand what you read you need to have the appropriate background knowledge." He criticizes the formalistic theories of literacy that focus almost entirely on formal reading skills without paying much attention to the background knowledge or schema that students need to know before they can comprehend a given text. ... Hirsch concludes "that shared information is a necessary background to true literacy." Source - Cultural Literacy in the New Millennium: Revisiting E.D. Hirsch.

The "cultural processes" that your student refers to seem to relate to Hirsch's argument that we must understand how students utilize and process "background knowledge" aka their personal "cultural literacy" to gain full understanding of what they encounter in education and in readings.

If you're worried, I'd look into Hirsch's work a little further to see if he seems to be pulling more from it. It does look like he may be doing so, particularly because of he describes "true literacy" (a phrase Hirsch uses) a lot like how Hirsch describes cultural literacy. He may not, though! It's definitely your call in the end what's going on here.

EDIT: It is definitely from the article mentioned in /u/od_9 's post, but the author (a prof at UC Berkeley) is using cultural literacy ideas from Hirsch and similar scholars, so I wasn't completely off-track!

You could start with a book like this: E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy or Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book or How to Think About the Great Ideas.

Or you can, like you've said, gather some info. about certain historical periods or cultural eras and decide to learn more about them. It's not easy, but you're living in a time where you can easily and freely access a lot of information.

E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy often gets attacked as being too conservative. I haven't actually read it to give my own opinion, but that's the reputation.

Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind might interest you, too. Bloom was definitely conservative, but the book curiously gets a certain amount of play among leftist thinkers.

Cultural Literacy is the the foundation of the second book Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.

It's the Reader's Digest Condensed version of what you seek, but it could be a good springboard for you so that you're able to find things you might want to learn more about.