The Corrosive Nature of Literacy

 The Corrosive Nature of Literacy

    After reading What’s “new” in New Literacy Studies? by Brian Street I’m wondering what it’s all for; I mean, what is it really all for. I admit that I am very impressed at what the science of learning and literacy has accomplished, is accomplishing, and is continuing to accomplish but what is it really all for? You can color me a skeptical conspiracist for looking at literacy as more than a new science of learning but as yet another way of stratifying social hierarchies with those who “know” and those who don’t, those who have and those who have not.

Street draws our attention to literacy as being regarded as “autonomous”, “ideological”, and then extends “literacy events” to “literacy practices” and then bridges its deficiencies. The “autonomous” model of literacy is defined by Street as the model of literacy where “the assumption that literacy in itself—autonomously—will have effects on other social and cognitive practices (Street 77).” This approach means that if you introduce literacy to the “poor, ‘illiterate’ people” they will then become smarter, improve their social and economic conditions and then rise from the doldrums of their lives. Street concludes that this approach “is simply imposing western conceptions of literacy on to other cultures (Street 77).” Street describes the ideological model of literacy as “being about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity and being (Street 77).” Street continues by saying “it is also always embedded in social practices…” and “is always contested, by both its meanings and its practices … are always ‘ideological’, they are always rooted in a particular world-view and in a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalize others (Street 78). Literacy events are described as the way social practices and conceptions of reading and writing are given meaning by the participants in those events (Street 78). At the crux of my issue with the Science of Literacy can be discovered in what Street says, “literacy does not necessarily have the effects that the rhetoric has suggested – improved health, cognition, empowerment” and this makes it harder for policymakers to “persuade funders to support literacy programs (Street 78).” Street continues to describe a process of bridging the problem with engaging between theory and practice, academic and applied concerns in hopes of constructing more meaningful solutions to spreading literacy but does spreading even this most advanced approach to literacy science help the cultures and societies it aims to benefit?

My aim isn’t to restate what has already been stated but to point out the agencies of control inherent in the definition of the models of literacy and therefore inherent in their application. The autonomous model of literacy imposes western ideology. The ideological model of literacy is always embedded in social practices that marginalize others. Literacy events of social literacy where the participants give meaning to those events function in a defined setting.  We assume literacy to be applied benignly and in good conscious but look at our society.

We are arguably the most literate society in the world and what do we use it for? Our society’s agents, those most inclined towards using literacy, use literacy in more and more creative ways to control the cultural landscape. The conspiratorial “they” use their powers of literacy to deceive us with powerful research into rhetoric and use it to map our political and social interaction (don’t believe me? research the Boogeyman “Lee Atwater” and that other rhetorical genius behind Bush Jr’s campaign). Our cultures value systems are based upon our own capitalist ideology and I’d argue are also defined by them. Our literacy practices, as we interact with one another, are dictated to us in varying ways by “those” in positions of power (social networking tycoons, pop-culture, media moguls, powerful political entities, the power-elite). Aren’t these advanced uses of literacy by the “power elite” a product of our advanced literacy science? What is missing as we describe and become aware of the science of literacy is the paradox of their relation to the defining process and the effect these processes have on the societies that it encounters. Are we using our advanced research and knowledge into the science of Literacy to advance other cultures or to subjugate them by turning them into future paying customers? Are we corrupting their ideological systems by imposing Western culture on them in dynamic and subversive ways? Does the science of literacy have a corrosive effect or a good one and in what measure of both?