On Redefining Literacy

Many these days are suggesting that there is a need to change how we define literacy. The argument usually goes something like this: since the advent of social networking, computers and gaming, the way students read has changed. They no longer read books, but they do read. We need to change the way we teach or define literacy to fit the way students now read. My response is that this is changing the question to fit the answer.

The reading of larger, more complex works of literature goes back to the beginnings of literature itself (as anyone who has wrestled with the Iliad, or the Epic of Gilgamesh can attest). These stories are as long as they are because it was felt that the story required it. Many of these stories began as long poems that had to be memorized; a lot of work for something that would not be that important. As Robert Bly has pointed out in many of his works, these tales were about more than a story, they are about a way of living.

Many may say that reading and writing are not the only way to gain and to pass on knowledge. That is true. I myself am a consumer of audio books, videos and podcasts. But for thousands of years writing and reading have been the main way of transferring and receiving the most important of information. I doubt that this will change anytime soon; at least not until we have found a way to transplant knowledge. It is more likely that visual and audio formats will continue to grow as supplementary, and in a few cases they will often be the best medium. To tout new media as an end to traditional literacy, however, is to engage in science fiction.

The error in the thinking of the effort to redefine literacy, I think, lies in the postmodern rejection of the metanarrative. In current thinking, all narratives are equal. The working out of this idea is that, if one does not like the narrative of something, say literacy, one can simply exchange it for something that one does like. The problem with this is that not everything is a matter of narrative. “Two plus two makes four” is the same regardless of the particular narrative of a culture.

A friend of mine once said that one should never change a custom until he or she discover why the custom was instituted in the first place. Reading has been around for thousands of years. Much of the wisdom of that time is collected in good sized tomes. Think of religious texts: the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran, etc. Many people of the world consider these texts foundational to their understanding of life. Furthermore, many of these texts require higher levels of literacy to comprehend. This says nothing of the texts which are foundational to a culture’s understanding of itself such as a government’s foundational documents and the great literature of the culture. To turn our back on these would be to devolve intellectually into modern barbarians.

The other day, an instructor stated that many of his students can no longer communicate their thoughts. He suggested that they may understand a thought, but could not verbalize it. I have since had other instructors from more than one college echo this concern. It is as if the thought takes more than a tweet to communicate, they run into a verbal wall. Still, the question arises, can a person understand thoughts that they cannot read in the first place?

We have heard that the new commodity in our country is information, but it is more than that. It is thoughts, especially complex thought with which we have to wrestle. It is possible that, in the future, the great economic divide will not be the have and have nots solely, but between the understands and the understand nots as well as between those who can and cannot communicate what they understand. In other words, it will be between the literate and the non-literate.