The Whale Belly

I know why literacy matters to me. It simply does. I write so it’s in my interest to be able to do so. I think it’s important to keep a glib, perhaps stupid perspective like this. I didn’t always. Years ago I worked as a teacher who taught others how to read and write, and when my students would demand I tell them why they should spend so much time doing either, I fell back on old arguments about becoming more logical thinkers and developing higher levels of consciousness.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those were the arguments made by comparative literacy scholars in the early to mid twentieth century that wiggled their way into the commonsense discourse of today. They studied “preliterate” societies and concluded that they relied too much on memorization instead of analysis, and since their knowledge was passed down by word of mouth it was either too stagnant or too erratic. Literate societies, on the other hand, were capable of generating new knowledge through the logic and contemplation inherent in printed text. And because knowledge was there, in ink, the evolution of that knowledge could be studied historically and continuously refined. It was deemed obvious that, as a result of these divisions of knowledge generation, there was a wide consciousness gap between “modern” and “savage” minds.

Literacy anthropologists and social psychologists in the latter half of the twentieth century challenged this idea on a number of fronts. First, the generalization of a “literate society” and a “preliterate society” was too reductive. It didn’t grasp the complexities of literacy use practices in either of these categories, and, in the end, it was questioned if such societies actually existed in the first place. Second, social literacy theory moved from an autonomous literacy model, which claimed that literacy itself caused changes in society and consciousness, to an ideological model that saw literacy as being the result of a changing society, and changes in people being less a change in consciousness than a change in common social practices. Literacy, according to social literacy theorists, is not so much an advancement of the mind as a useful tool in a society that values literacy. It’s not intrinsically important, it is only important when it is situated in a literate community that uses it for specific purposes.

As I’ve studied literacy more and more, the question about whether my students should have to read and write so much bothered me. It’s obvious to me that at least some literacy is important just to function in this society. But to what extent should people, young or old, be forced to learn — and wouldn’t such literacy be learned in practice anyway if it was so important? That’s the less clear part. It seems that any teaching beyond what a person deems necessary for his own life is bound to fall on deaf ears. People who want to write want to learn everything they can about it. Those who just need to be able to get through their day-to-day lives only want to learn what’s necessary. Oughtn’t it be up to them to decide that?

There’s a book by J. Elspith Stuckey who argued that literacy, at least the way we approach it in schools, is not empowering as much as it is violent. By overemphasizing the importance of literacy in determining things like intelligence and morals, we privileged literates have been able to maintain our relative sense of superiority and justify the poverty and disenfranchisement of those who can’t or choose not to read or write.

It requires much more thought than I can give to it in this post, but suffice to say for now that the question of why one should be forced to read or write when they don’t want to is not as clear-cut as it seems. During our time of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” it seems like people should be forced to learn a more discerning kind of literacy. Then again, maybe the economic instability that causes people to gather around fearmongers and demagogues in the first place is the more important matter.