Are the values for a mainstream educated person and an Old Order Amish student the same? Do the mainstream culture and the people of the Trackton community hold the same expectations for their children when they complete school? From various readings we can answer this with a simple no, but we should ask ourselves "why is this?". One main reason is because in different social cultures, literacy's value is defined by the culture's expectation of its people. We will now explore these three culture types and give examples of literacy's value within the cultures.
             The goal of the mainstream education system is to prepare its students for post secondary education. This type of education starts with the basic reading and comprehension skills learned in elementary school. Starting with these skills gives the children a solid base to build the grammar learned in middle school and on into high school. Middle school gives the children basic grammar understandings such as nouns, verbs, proper sentence structure, and basic composition assignments. Middle school also takes reading to the next level by increasing the difficulty of the reading assignments. Finally high school is the last step for the students to obtain the literacy skills they will need in order to have a successful college career. High school explores more in depth literary works like poetry, the classic novels, and epics such as Beau wolf and The Canterbury Tales. The grammatical focus has gone from simple compositions to multi page reports with grammatical errors if any at all. By now the students are prepared to pursue a college education. Once at college the placement test will dictate at what level of difficulty the students will continue to become literate.
             The second example of culture dependent literacy is the people of the Trackton community. In this small town, the author describes the pre-school literacy learning and the social expec
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