We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together.
Post 2: Scribner
Max Struble
Scribner wrote that “Ideal literacy is simultaneously adaptive, socially empowering, and self-enhancing.”
I understood immediately that literacy is empowering and self-enhancing, but until reading “Literacy in Three Metaphors”, I did understand how literacy is adaptive.
Literacy is difficult to define. Attempts have been made to inventory “minimal functional competencies”(15), but ask Scribner asserts, “[It is unrealistic] to try to specify some uniform set of skills as constituting functional literacy for all adults”(16).
The need for literacy to adapt is illustrated in the “sliding scale” used by the U.S. Bureau of Census to determine literacy. During World War I, a fourth grade education was deemed sufficient. “Today’s standards for functional competency need to be considered in the light of tomorrow’s requirements”(17).
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One Reply to “Post 2: Scribner”
So how do we “adapt” in literacy? I like the idea and see how it can work, but how are we adapting? Are the educated already adapted or still adapting? It makes sense that we are always adapting, while those who are illiterate never adapt.