“Literacy would appear to be one of the few elements of education that everyone agrees to be a necessity of modernity,”(421) states John Szwed. Throughout his discourse on literacy, Szwed questions to define literacy and how it is important today. He clarifies that what we perceive as literacy should be re-examined, as different ethnicities and different socio-economic classes may read different things that society doesn’t construe as literature. He stresses that literature affects lives, as it is one of the key factors in getting along in today’s society. He mentions five elements of literacy – text, context, function, participants and motivation.
Texts, what do we read and write? Szwed tells us that circulation and sales figures can’t tell us about what is read or how much is read because we borrow books and magazines, we share newspapers at restaurants and bus stations. Keeping in mind that Szwed wrote this before the invention of the internet, his writings would surely have in them notes regarding the amount of information shared on the internet via e-mail, websites, and blogs. Szwed also mentions that different cultures read different materials, graffiti for example can be read, gambling slips, pornographic material, juke box labels, cereal box labels, etc. These things are literature, but cannot be recorded or tested as literature prowess. Typography is also mentioned as the type of text used in order to affirm authority, as seen in Helvetica type, used by the government and large business logos throughout America.
Context, function, participants and motivation are all interlaced with why and what circumstance is reading and writing done. Szwed cites different ways that we read, grocery store signs and their locale, vacation readings, religious reading and he also illustrates that the cultures we grow up with affect our reading ability. In the Native American group, it was found by Susan U. Philips, that if children were not read to at home, they were likely to encounter difficulties in learning to read. “Educators often assume that reading and writing form a single standard set of skills to be acquired and used as a whole by individuals who acquire them in a progression of steps which can not be varied or avoided in learning,”(426) states Szwed. We immediately notice the faults in the assumptions made by the educators. How can we as a variety of different cultures be taught to as one? The white-Anglo-Saxon culture is at its decline and crowning is a new generation and new culture.
Literacy must too evolve in a way that is productive, and not cheapen or debase culture, language and literature. To test youth on literacy skills and to teach them literacy skills with texts that are out of date and out of touch with the new generational norms is unfair. Szwed emphasizes that we, as a society, “need to look at reading and writing as activities having consequences.”(428) Our goal should be to instill the ability to read and write by utilizing the most appropriate means to achieve this goal. This will almost certainly mean branching out into areas typically unorthodox. I would have benefited reading books that motivated me to read because I would have read them rather than “sparknoted” them and grasped stronger the concepts being taught at an earlier age.
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