The ability to
write standard academic English and to produce a logical written argument have
together defined what it is to be truly literate, at least since
the Enlightenment. The source of the notion goes much farther back, however, to
Western civilization’s Greek roots. In fact, ancient Greece of the 8th
century BC inspired a view of literacy that took hold a half century ago,
stemming from the idea that the emergence of alphabetic writing caused a
dramatic and thorough change in human thought, a kind of cognitive divide. In
the past three decades, however, other scholars have found it to be an
inadequate model for understanding literacy, and they have proposed other
theories they believe to be more accurate and useful.
Social
anthropologist Jack Goody is the scholar most closely associated with the
cognitive divide theory of literacy. It originated with his 1977 work, “Domestication
of the Savage Mind,” in which he weighs in on the great divide theories current
at the time, those that sought to make distinctions between the primitive and
the civilized mind. According to a reexamination by scholars Michael and
Jennifer Cole (2006), Goody argued against
such a duality, finding in his own ethnographic work with non-literate
societies in Ghana, that people who could not read or write still did exercise
critical faculties and independent thought. Goody then, however, goes on to
introduce a divide of his own, one he developed further in “The Consequences of
Literacy,” a paper he co-authored with Ian Watt. Goody and Watt claim that
writing profoundly changes the cognitive abilities of those who use it and that
shift triggers significant social changes as well. First, they examine the
differences between oral societies and those in which writing is commonplace,
what they define as literacy. Oral societies, they claim, live in a mythic
world and in mythic time, passing down their cultural histories and heritage
verbally from person to person. This form of transmission allows the editing
out—consciously or unconsciously—of what no longer serves to keep the community
intact and unchanged, a condition they call “cultural homeostatis.” Goody and Watt
then look to ancient Greece in the sixth century BC and the emergence of
alphabetic script for the first time in human history. They contend that the
spread of literacy transformed thought throughout the culture, replacing myth with history; giving
birth to logic, rhetoric and reasoned discourse; and generating the disciplines
of science and philosophy. In contrast to the cultural homeostatis of
non-literate societies, ancient Greece, and by extension other societies that
become literate, value challenge and change. When readers can observe
inconsistencies between received wisdom and the written record or between one
text and another, they become skeptical and develop thoughts independently of
given wisdom. Ultimately, Goody and Watt claimed, this transformation led to
the development of more complex social institutions and democratic
self-governing. Writing, in their description, is valuable in and of itself,
but also because it is linked qualitatively to a particular developmental arc
and social outcome.
Walter J. Ong is
another scholar associated with the cognitive divide notion of literacy. In his
paper “Writing is a Technology that Structures Thought,” as the title suggests,
he focuses on the technology of writing and its effects on cognition. Writing,
in this view, is the technology of intellect. Like Goody and Watt, Ong closely
examines the differences between oral communication and written communication,
seeking to understand how each shapes consciousness. Ong believes one of the
key distinctions of writing is that it is diaeretic—it separates. Writing
separates the word from sound, the source of the communication from its
recipient, the past from the present, academic learning from wisdom, high
society from low, even the knower from the known. Still, Ong believes writing
is an advancement in human history, claiming that even as writing separates, it
allows humans to “know” they are separate, to become conscious of it, and in so
doing to become more fully human.
Goody, Watt, and
Ong share a focus on the individual and on the role that writing has played
historically in shaping and valuing the individual separate from the background
community. Once knowledge was no longer dependent on person-to-person contact,
once skepticism became the norm, and once dispassionate discourse—logic—was
prized, the reader became empowered to create his or her own form of knowledge.
The focus on the individual was a key component of the school of literacy that
became associated with the great divide, the autonomous theory of literacy.
British scholar
Brian Street disagreed wholeheartedly with Goody and others’ orientation toward
a cognitive divide orientation approach to literacy but it was he who gave it its
name. In his book “Literacy in Theory and Practice,” Street called it
“autonomous” because of its focus on print literacy alone but more so because
it saw those skills as separate from the practitioner’s social context. The
autonomous, or neoclassical, approach sees literacy above all as the technical
skill of learning to decode and encode texts. The learner’s success or failure
at that enterprise is viewed as a matter of individual motivation and desire to
assimilate into the dominant society. (Wiley/2005) While professing to be
politically and socially neutral, this approach tracks with and favors the
development of western society, with its traditional notions of progress,
civilization, and upward social mobility.
Street attacks the foundation of Goody and Watt’s argument,
their focus on the transformative effect of alphabetic writing in ancient
Greece, arguing that there were other social and economic changes and forces at
play at the time. Similarly, he calls the unique value placed on writing
to be a kind of “technological determinism” that suggests cultures who learn to
write follow a predictable path, again ignoring the true complexity of social
forces at play as literacy is adopted by different cultures. Street also finds
the claim that the Greeks developed logic to be Eurocentric, ignoring the
achievements of the Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, and others.
Many scholars who find fault with the autonomous view of literacy point
out that is it virtually impossible to test the cognitive divide theory since
most cultures, including our own, are a blend of oral and print. In addition,
most literates have been to school, so it becomes difficult to filter out the
cognitive effects of writing from the effect of schooling. Social psychologists
Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole demonstrated these claims in their work with
the Vai people of Liberia during the 1970’s. The Vai retained many of the
traditions of oral culture, spoke several languages, and had developed a unique
writing system, yet there was no widespread schooling, no public writing, and
many were also illiterate. In
studying a culture with such a range of literacy-associated habits, Scribner
and Cole found there was little psychological difference between those who
could write and those who couldn’t. Instead, they found that what mattered
psychologically and cognitively, what engaged or did not engage higher orders
of thinking, was the uses that people made of their literacy skills. Their work
helped create a paradigm shift in the field toward an approach that came to be
known as the social practices model of literacy. (Wiley/2005)
Scholars of the
social practices approach believe that literacy practices have a variety of
functions and purposes within different social activities, groups, and
cultures. They focus less on the individual and the acquisition of discreet
skills, and more on the many different ways in which people use or engage with
language, particularly written language, in their everyday lives. Their view of
literacy activities is broad, including everything from reading a novel to
reading a “Sell by” date on a milk carton, and from writing a text message to
navigating a web page. According to the social practices view, there are many
varieties of literacies, depending on their purposes and contexts. Train
literacy, for instance, includes not only reading the train schedule but also
understanding all the behavioral habits and social organization involved with
taking a train in a particular place and time. (Papen/2005)
James Paul Gee and
Paulo Freire go further, arguing that literacy practices must also be seen as
part of a context of power and privilege. As a consequence, and in contrast to
the autonomous view of literacy, the social practices approach seeks to dignify
the literacy learner by understanding and respecting the language practices
they bring to the enterprise, while allowing those embedded skills to be
engaged as a platform for learning new skills. (Wiley/2005;
Rivera/Huerata-Macias/2010). This understanding supports the social practices
view that their approach toward literacy has a better chance of success in
teaching traditional literacy skills—reading and writing—to those who have
non-traditional literacy skills both here in the United States and around the
world. (Papen/2005)
Scholars and
practitioners have spent the past several decades refuting the cognitive divide
theory of literacy and developing the social practices model in its place. The
cognitive divide theory reflected centuries of western thought about history,
the social order, and a single view of the value of reading and writing. But as
the world has grown smaller, as scholars have studied different cultures more
closely, and as that dispassionate discourse so prized by traditionalists has
been brought to bear on the study of literacy itself, a social practices
approach came to be viewed as more appropriate and applicable to a wider group
of places and cultures. The introduction of newer, digital technologies would
seem only to underscore its value in an increasingly multi-modal,
multi-literate world.
Bibliography
Cole, Jennifer and Michael Cole.
“Rethinking the Goody Myth.” Technology, Literacy,
and the Evolution of Society:
Implications of the Work of Jack Goody.
Ed. David
R. Olson.
New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. 305-324.
Goody, J. and I Watt 1968: “The
Consequences of Literacy.” Comparative Studies in
Society
and History 5.3 (1963): 304-345. Web. 13
October 2013
Ong, Walter J., S.J. “Writing is a
Technology that Restructures Thought.” Literacy: A
Critical
Sourcebook. Ed. Ellen Cushman, et al.
Boston and New York:
Bedford/St.Martin’s,
2001. 19-31. Print.
Papen, Uta. Adult Literacy as
Social Practice: More Than Skills. London:
Routledge,
2009.
Print.
Rivera, Klaudia M. and Ana
Huerta-Macias. Adult Biliteracy: Sociocultural and
Programmatic
Responses. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Street, Brian V., ed. Literacy
and Development: Ethnographic Perspectives.
London:
Routledge,
2001. Web. 18 November 2013.
--- Literacy in Theory and
Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984. Web.
15
November 2013.
Wiley, Terrence G. Literacy and
Language Diversity in the United States, 2nd
ed.
Washington
D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005. Print.
