Blog #2

One of the comments I found most interesting in the reading was “Literacy is not a necessity for personal survival”. I found this interesting for (mainly) two reasons. One, I don’t know if I agree or disagree with it. No, technically we do not need literacy to survive, but it sure does make life more enjoyable and liveable. As we found out in the reading, there are areas, such as Vai, that count literacy as being able to memorize and pass on ancestors stories and be the family “book keeper” by knowing dates and such. And that duty is generally designated to one person, meaning the rest of the population does not know how to read or write. So, the case study provided in the article helps us realize that we do not in fact need literacy to survive, technically.

The other reason I found this quote interesting is that, in Western culture at least, I kind of feel that we do need it to survive. As we all seemed to realize more than we were aware of, we read and write on a daily basis for pretty much everything we do: we read road signs, paper work, assignments, shopping lists, social media and texting, to name a few. For writing: typing, taking notes, writing a shopping list, texting, communicating on social media outlets. We read and write all day, every day. In western culture, and as stated in the article, “the single most compelling fact about literacy is that it is a social achievement”. Humans need to have sociability, leading to literacy, in their lives or we go crazy. Think of Tom Hanks in Cast Away and what a lack of communication did to him. While I can agree that we don’t need it for basic survival, it has definitely made our lives easier to live and created a literate, social, and safe world for us to live in.