Sui Generis

I want to bring up my concerns with this concept of “autonomous literacy”

 

Autonomous literacy states that there should be a standardized criteria and practice of literacy and that it should be imposed upon countries viewed as illiterate so as to improve the well-being of that country’s standard of living. This standardized literacy is that of our own American, “superior” literacy.

 

Brian Street, in his article “Whats “new” in Literary Practices” states that  “Introducing literacy to poor, “illiterate” people, villages, urban youth etc. will have the effect of enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, making them better citizens, regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for their “illiteracy” in the first place” (77). To disregard social conditions, whether in gauging literacy or illiteracy, is to disregard its most fundamental and powerful component. A child obtaining literary practices does so within the society that harbors them, not from some foreign entity claiming superiority. An American student would find little to relate to in Ghanaian poet, Nii Parkes’ writings of life in a tribe just as a Ghanaian student would find little to relate to within an Ayn Rand novel of industry and capitalism. This model, though it seems great on paper, eliminates the idea of literacy being something formed within a culture and and thereby eliminates the vast amount of literary catalysts found within that culture such as sponsors and cultural needs and biases.

 

Literacy is broad and comprehensive. It is not to be rendered nor diluted into any one “true” form. Its development and growth should be as personal and esoteric as that of your own growth in your own culture. Yes, there are prominent cases of illiteracy outside of our own country, as to which may curtail that foreign society’s growth, but who are we to claim our literacy as the nostrum of this standardized infirmity? Is the possibility of eliminating society’s problems worth the certainty of eliminating its idiosyncratic nature?