When we look at literacy in terms of social construct, we can strip away the individuals problems with literacy.  Reading a book or writing a paper does not necessarily prepare one for life in the social world.  It harkens back to the idea of “functional literacy.”  Rather than viewing literacy as the ability to read a novel in a few hours time, or to effectively wade through the frustrating waters of ethnographies, graduate level research papers, and other scholarly writing in a single night without breaking a sweat or having a panic attack, it becomes a matter of what is necessary in order to live a happy and full life.  Perhaps those are words I’m applying a bit liberally here: “happy and full.”  But it is the best way I can think to put it.  Not everyone needs to be a speed reader to be able to enjoy life.  More than a few people would cry at the idea that they were being forced to reread Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck (I can’t blame them.  Even I, who love literature and reading, can’t stomach that idea).

But on the flip-side there are people like a friend of mine, who hates reading of any sort.  It is not because she cannot read; she simply dislikes it.  She is a perfectly “literate person.”  She could pick up the newspaper and read the front headlines with ease, even make intelligent comments about it.  Does that make her illiterate?  Hardly.  Functional literacy, as I understand it, refers to the idea of being adequately literate.  If you can read the label of a medication, you might be considered “functionally literate.”

It’s difficult to resign myself to this idea, because I am immediately forced to say that they are “literate enough,” as though being functionally literate falls somehow short of the mark.  This, of course, is not the case.

Functional literacy simply means that a person has enough literacy to live safely in this world.  They can read street signs, map keys, medication labels, instructions manuals, anything which is a necessary part of life.  An ethnography is not a necessary part of life for, shall we say, “normal” people.  A working stiff has no reason to come home a sift through a scholarly textbook anymore than an anthropologist needs to come home and operate a forklift.  If we continue to use this metaphor, we get this:

A working class stiff is “illiterate” because he is incapable of reading a scholarly text.  Equally, an anthropologist is without skill, as they cannot operate a forklift.  Neither of these things pertain to the social construct each of these people live within.  As Einstein said, “Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”