Three Perspectives on Literacy

Three Perspectives on Literacy
by Harold Jarche | Thu, 11/13/2008 - 20:42

Almost everywhere you turn today someone is lamenting the lack of literacy or the inability of certain generations or groups to articulate their thoughts. For instance, Chris Hedges, in America the Illiterate states that the lack of print literacy is creating a society that is not able to reason or understand the complexities of our modern world.

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.

A different perspective is presented by Mark Federman in Why Johnny and Janey Can't Read, and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can't Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in tumultuous times. He concludes in his paper:

Have no fear – Johnny and Janey will, in all probability, learn to read, just as they learned to speak. But orality has not structured society since ancient Greece, and literacy no longer structures society today. The challenge for all the Mr. and Ms. Smiths throughout the academy, and eventually in the secondary and primary classrooms throughout the world, is to recognize that the exclusive focus and predominance given to the pedagogical artefacts of a literate world is inconsistent with the skills necessary to participate in the discovery and production of knowledge in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate [UCaPP] world. In a UCaPP world, what is valued as knowledge comprises a vastly greater domain than that in world structured by literacy.

Finally, Mike Wesch, in the video of his presentation to The Library of Congress, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, gives examples of how videos, and especially video-making, are creating a different literacy enabling a new type of worldwide communication in this powerful medium.

Literacy, it seems, is in the eye and ear of the beholder.

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