A good understanding of this chapter's content would include an understanding of why each of these terms is important to education.

conventional literacy
an account of literacy that accepts a minimal criterion, such as the ability to sign one's name, as evidence of the ability to read and write and that results in estimates of literacy rates in contemporary society from 97 to 99 percent.

critical literacy
an account of literacy that emphasizes not merely the ability to read and write but the ability to use reading and writing as the basis of higher-order thinking skills that allow a person to analyze and critically evaluate that which is read and written.

cultural literacy
a conception of literacy that emphasizes not the ability simply to read and write but the ability to make sense of what is read through familiarity with a wide range of cultural references and allusions.

cultural or ideological hegemony
an explanation of social harmony in the presence of deep social inequality; emphasizes the domination of public discourse by such a limited range of explanations that the disadvantaged lack access to alternative explanations of the social order that might mobilize resistance to powerlessness.

functional literacy
a conception of literacy that emphasizes the level of ability to read and write necessary to function well in a particular society.

hidden curriculum
a term coined by the educational researcher Philip Jackson in the 1960s to describe the socializing processes of schooling that are not described in the formal or academic curriculum.

the "information marketplace" versus a "marketplace of ideas"
a distinction designed to draw attention to the difference between the Jeffersonian ideal of an unfettered exchange of ideas in search of the truth and contemporary practices that package new ideas as products to be sold to the consumer.

mass media
broadcast, electronic, and print media that reach large proportions of the population nationally and internationally in the contemporary world.

NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress)
an ongoing longitudinal study of student learning in schools; sometimes referred to as "the nation's report card" because it is informative about educational progress across the United States.

Paulo Freire
author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972); a Brazilian educator whose work was translated throughout the world in the 1970s and 1980s and after his death in the 1990s; seminal theorist in critical, liberationist pedagogy.