I've only some elementary points to make, especially since I think the idea is
probably misguided in the first place.
First the obvious one--whose or which culture are you talking about? Let's assume that most contemporary societies have experienced considerable immigration, were multicultural or multi-linguistic from early on (e.g., Switzerland), or were products of colonial boundary drawing, and are being affected by other cultures around the world. So there is no single thing to be called a nation's culture, since the common assumptions or backgrounds people use are varied and changing. Rather than assuming that "cultural literacy" is a clear, well-defined concept you might begin by making explicit what kind of background knowledge you view as important and why, recognizing that it will be more consistent some parts (groups, regions) of a society than others. As an example to make the point I recall an interesting study years ago (Growing up in Flatbush??) that compared what city kids and farm kids knew, treating both as knowledgable, but about different things. City kids had no idea where their food came from or how animals procreated, for example. Is that cultural literacy? Why not? A second point is that even academic or school culture differs between societies, giving them unique strengths and weaknesses. A study by Liv Gronmo of Oslo University a few years back ("Looking for Cultural and Geographical Factors in Patterns of Responses to TIMSS Items") found that an analysis of differences in which items were answered correctly or incorrectly by students in different countries showed that these patterns of right and wrong answers clustered in wider cultural or linguistic groups. In effect, different cultures, such as Anglo-American, Scandinavian, East Asian, etc. taught their children somewhat similar skills, compared to others. This included both distinctive strengths and weaknesses. This suggests that in defining a "culture" you need to think of comparisons. It also suggests that learning a distinctive culture involves both notable strengths and weaknesses, at least when measured by international norms (tests), which are themselves designed with political representatives and disputes over which items favor one country or another. So, in teaching "cultural literacy" would you want to teach the distinctive weakness of a culture (which might also be the basis for other strengths)? For instance, those from one kind of background might be good at geometric thinking but not so good at algebraic thinking. If every strength suggests a related weakness, as well, since one cannot invest energy and attention in everything, which bit do you want? Obviously I am trying to raise some questions about the effort. Perhaps most importantly, one should not hide behind apparently neutral terms like "cultural literacy" that involve value choices that should be made more openly and explicitly.