Tag: literacy (page 1 of 1)

May 27, 2025

here we go again

In my lifetime, I have watched the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with books. Not just of our children, who have been the unwitting guinea pigs of growing up inside cellphones, but among all of us human beings. We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share. Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.

I guess if people keep writing this sort of thing I’ll keep responding with the same questions:

When Krauss says “We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written,” who are “we”?
Presumably she does not mean herself. She seems to be referring, rather, to “an entire culture.” But if our entire culture has “give[n] up on, and cease[d] to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language,” then how do we have novelists like Nicole Krauss?
Krauss says that people have given up on the struggle to “translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share” — but is that true? When I look at the internet I see an astonishing amount of writing, writing done for others to read and share. Is an underproduction of writing really our problem?
If “we have … begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are,” when did “we” have that attachment? When did “we” acquire it?

Let me ride my old hobby-horse once more: The reading and writing of books — and when Krauss says “books” I think she’s primarily referring to novels — has always been a minority pursuit. Until recently Western cultures did not even aspire to universal literacy, and until quite recently no one imagined that universal literacy would extend to the reading and comprehension of novels and poems by all young people. The idea that Western culture as a whole should involve encounters with serious literature is largely a product of World War II and the period following. That’s when we saw the percentage of the population who read novels rise to the highest level in human history. As I wrote last year:

The not wholly tangential question, of course, is what counts as “long-term.” The kind of variation in skills and interests that I have described can happen over a handful of years but also over decades and centuries. One might ask not just how American university students today compare to those of twenty or thirty years ago but also how they compare to students from a century ago. That would have been a much smaller population, for one thing, because before the G.I. Bill of 1944 sent millions of former soldiers to university, many of whom otherwise would never have considered it, a university education was not the passport to white-collar employment and a stable middle-class life that it has since become. As Kotsko’s essay indicates, we now expect what in historical perspective is a shockingly large percentage of our young adults to be able to read and write about complex texts in philosophy, literature, and related disciplines. But perhaps those are, over a truly long period of time, not reasonable expectations. What looks like a disastrous collapse in literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.

What percentage of English people could have read Paradise Lost when it appeared? What percentage of Americans could have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it appeared? We have to know things like this if we’re going to make comparative assertions. But people make comparative assertions all the time without even thinking about such matters.

I agree that novels, and other long narratives, have become less culturally central, less influential, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. (And I regret this.) But are they less culturally central than they were a hundred years ago? I’m not sure about that. Two hundred years ago? Hard to say.

How many ambitious and masterful novels can we reasonably expect our culture to produce each year? How many thoughtful and sensitive readers can we reasonably expect those novels to have? I don’t find these questions easy to answer.

May 2, 2025

William A. and the future

Let’s think about the story of William A., who graduated from high school in Tennessee with a 3.4 GPA, despite being illiterate. How did this happen?

Apart from his dyslexia itself, William’s most salient “circumstance” for our purposes was that — with proper instruction — he can learn to read. See L.H., 900 F.3d at 795–96. The school has not even tried to prove that finding wrong; yet William graduated from high school without being able to read or even to spell his own name. That was because, per the terms of his IEPs, he relied on a host of accommodations that masked his inability to read. To write a paper, for example — as the ALJ described — William would first dictate his topic into a document using speech-to-text software. He then would paste the written words into an AI software like ChatGPT. Next, the AI software would generate a paper on that topic, which William would paste back into his own document. Finally, William would run that paper through another software program like Grammarly, so that it reflected an appropriate writing style. Not all these workarounds were specifically listed in his IEP, but all were enabled by an accommodation that was: 24 extra hours to complete all assignments, which allowed William to complete his assignments at home, using whatever technology tools he could find.

First of all, we should admire William A.’s ingenuity in finding ways to do his assignments without having been taught to read and write. That said, he must have had some level of literacy to use ChatGPT and Grammarly, unless he enlisted people to help him: perhaps William benefited from work with a dyslexia specialist hired by his parents, something his school deemed unnecessary.

Presumably his parents did not themselves help William do his work, or not much, because they’re the ones who sued the school system for failing to provide the education promised him by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. That act requires schools to make accomodations for disabled students that provides an education equivalent to that received by non-disabled students. William’s parents felt that since he was dyslexic but able to learn to read, the school system had an obligation to teach him to read, through whatever alternative instruction is appropriate for people with dyslexia.

What interests me is the school system’s defense, which is that William A. obviously was given an adequate education: look at his GPA. That is, if he could pass his courses, then he had been given appropriate compensation for his disability. On this account, passing courses in the humanities is what matters, even if the requisite writing is done by ChatGPT and Grammarly, and even if the students cannot himself read or write at all. That is: Literacy is optional to education.

Reading Adam Roberts’s superb 2024 novel Lake of Darkness, set in a pretty-far future, one comes gradually to realize that most of the characters are not just monolingual — a person who knows a second language is considered a prodigy — but also illiterate. A historian specializing in the 20th century “of course” knows the novel Alas in Wonderland — she’s never seen the book’s title, only heard it, like everyone else. (The Alas books, written as we all know by Carol Louis, were published in 1865 and 1871, not the twentieth century, but close enough.) Similarly, people speculate about the first name of the astronaut Armstrong — was it perhaps Nile, in honor of the ancient Egyptians? Also, the writer of Voyage to the Center of the Earth was Julie Verne. Culture has become a game of Telephone: one generation whispers in the ear of the next.

‘Do you do the reading and writing thing? I know a lot of historians master that.’

‘Some do,’ she said, feeling absurdly exposed. ‘Not me. It’s a lot of really fiddly work, is the truth, and I wanted – I wanted to concentrate my mental energies on other things. I mean, I know people who spent many years mastering one antique script only to discover that their primary sources were all written in another. And anyway, after all, anyway, anyway, of course, we can always just get an AI to read texts aloud, any old texts, to read and translate them. I mean –‘ She could feel her gabbling running away from her. Why couldn’t she stop? ‘– I mean, it’s still pretty boring, to be honest, sitting there whilst some AI reads some interminable antique text. Why were they so long, that’s what I want to know? Even at double speed, and even when the AI notices you fidgeting and tries to leaven the experience by doing each different piece in different voices, it’s still –‘

Berd reached out and touched her shoulder with his right hand. His gaze was steady, and as blue as a methane flame. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I understand. It’s hard.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes it is.’

‘There are other things to put your time and energy into.’

She grinned. ‘Exactly.’

April 1, 2025

assumptions

Sam Kahn:

That is the real existential dread of our age, that the stable value of the book is breaking down and the continuity between eras is dependent largely on whether Apple chooses to keep updating the Cloud or whether posterity is able to play an mp3. For people who are serious writers or creators, that’s really the question at the moment — who are they writing for or trying to transmit to? — since the assumption, a safe assumption for a couple of thousand years, that the people of the future would be readers, is no longer so reliable.

Is that what Virgil assumed? And Augustine? And Dante? — That “the people of the future would be readers”? If Kahn had said “there would be readers in the future” he’d have been on safer ground. Since they lived in societies in which perhaps one percent of the adult population were sufficiently literate to read a long treatise or poem, none of them expected wide readership: serious literacy had never been common and there was absolutely no reason to think it ever would become so. (One percent is probably a high estimate.) Milton’s hope, for “fit audience though few,” was the hope of every major writer until the 19th century.

N.B. Through much of the history of writing, “literacy” has been defined primarily as the ability to sign one’s name — something worth remembering when people talk about historical literacy rates. Take a look at this chart and try to figure out how it defines “literacy.”

Kahn is one of many people who talk about our “post-literate age,” which is kind of funny when you reflect that right now literacy is more widespread than it has been at any point in human history. Just think about how many people in the global South who as recently as fifty years ago would have been illiterate agricultural laborers now read and write every day. And it wasn’t that long ago that many Americans were, generally speaking, only barely literate. During the Second World War, the U.S. armed forces had trouble finding enough recruits who met their basic literacy standards. The history here is illuminating. (Those of us who teach might find it noteworthy that the U. S. Army embarked on a kind of literacy boot camp that got 95% of the illiterate recruits up to speed in two months.)

No, when people talk about living in a “post-literate society,” what they mean is this: Today a smaller percentage of Americans read books than did so in the two or three decades following the Second World War, when the G. I. Bill made high levels of literacy possible for millions of Americans who previously would have had no access to higher education. This is one of my old themes. I mean, going way back. And more recently too.

Even in a period of relative decline in serious reading ability — and we do indeed live in such a time — writers have access to a larger audience, proportionally and not just absolutely larger, than any great writer of the distant past would’ve dared to dream of. And that’s something worth remembering.

P.S. It would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t point to something else Kahn says that I want to disagree with. He writes, “One can only imagine how much smoother poor Robert Caro’s life would have been if he could have started with the presidency of his subject as opposed to spending forty years chasing down the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s student council experiences and then waiting until his 80s to write down the meat of his project.” Assumptions again: Kahn assumes that Johnson’s term as President is the “meat of [Caro’s] project.” But surely anyone who has read the books knows that it isn’t so. What fascinates Caro is that a young man, indeed a boy, from one of the most backward and poverty-stricken parts of America desperately wanted great power, believed he could achieve it, and somehow did achieve it, becoming the most powerful person in the world. How this happened — starting with Johnson’s becoming a mover and shaker in the schools he attended, since that is where he learned how to manipulate people without needing to be liked by them — is the real meat of the story, and his experiences as President make for little more than a coda. If Caro never finishes the final volume I’ll be sad, but I won’t feel that I’ve missed anything truly vital.

November 2, 2023

beyond belief

Last month I published a piece over at the Hog Blog on biblical and theological illiteracy among scholars — basically a summary of some recent work by Tim Larsen. I thought I had noted a few distressing examples there … but wow, did I just have a you-ain’t-seen-nuthin’-yet moment.

This review in the WSJ of a new book on the hymn “Amazing Grace” set my spidey-sense a-tingling — or rather, one passage from it did. I’ve been on the wrong end of reviewers’ careless dispensing of misinformation, so when I read this:

Mr. Walvin is compelling in his description of the deep presence of “Amazing Grace” in Anglophone, especially American, culture. He is less persuasive in some of his theological observations: I find it vanishingly unlikely that the famous 19th-century evangelist Dwight Moody “portrayed Christ himself as a sinner . . . with whom armies of ordinary people could identify.” The 18th-century Church of England did not consist of a “Latin-based priesthood” conducting “impenetrable Latin-based worship” — that had been decisively seen off 200 years earlier.

— I thought, That can’t be right. The author, James Walvin — a pretty eminent historian (primarily of The Atlantic slave trade) from the University of York — simply can’t have said those things. But lo and behold, here he is describing the D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey revival meetings in England:

Their down-to-earth style filled the largest of city venues wherever they appeared. They held 285 such meetings in London alone. Theirs was a style which, inevitably, was heartily disliked by the more solemn corners of British worship. When Ira Sankey performed in the parish church in the small Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-le-Frith, one parishioner was so outraged that he thought the local bishop “will have something to say” to the curate who had invited him.

Throughout, Moody portrayed Christ himself as a sinner, a person with whom armies of ordinary people could identify. If Christ could be saved, so too could the humble and ordinary people in the audience. Salvation was there for all. This simple, seductive point, a potent message for the poor in the late nineteenth century, was exactly what John Newton himself had pressed home, in his letters and hymns a century before. Salvation was available to all who repented.

And about Latin in the Church of England? Yep:

Throughout his teenage years at sea, John Newton had been an avid reader, buying books wherever he landed and struggling with the religious principles imparted by his devout mother. Elizabeth Newton had instilled in her son a highly disciplined love of reading — and worship. She read Bible stories to him, teaching him to respond to the catechisms and to memorize hymns and psalms, especially those written for children. Elizabeth loved the hymns of Isaac Watts and her son inevitably followed. They were hymns noted for their simplicity, using ordinary, comprehensible language and were quite unlike the impenetrable Latin-based worship of the Church of England at that time. Watts’s hymns were an aspect of the ongoing Reformation that wrenched worship free from an exclusive, Latin-based priesthood and relocated it among ordinary people, simply by using the common vernacular.

A few comments, typed with quivering hands:

The reviewer, Priscilla M. Jensen, calls these “theological observations,” but they are no such thing: they are historical statements that are catastrophically, outrageously wrong — the equivalent of saying that Benjamin Franklin was a Buddhist and that Frederick Douglass was a native speaker of French. They are so wrong, and wrong about facts so elementary, that I couldn’t possibly trust one word of Walvin’s book. Nor should any of you.
If Walvin thinks that “Christ could be saved,” by whom might that be accomplished? If Jesus Christ is one of the saved, who is the Savior? Perhaps Walvin could reflect on that name “Christ” — does he think that it’s Jesus’s surname, and that especially respectful people would refer to him as Mr. Christ?
If “throughout” his evangelistic sermons D. L. Moody called Mr. Christ a sinner, I would love to see just one example of it. But there isn’t one. It is not, as Jensen said, “vanishingly unlikely,” it is impossible. Moody’s entire theology — like that of every other orthodox Christian — was completely governed by his belief that, as the letter to the Hebrews says, “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”
James Walvin appears to be a Briton, in any case has certainly lived a number of years in Great Britain, and moreover has received a doctorate in history. How can he not know that the English prayer book was composed, issued, and mandated — with the Latin Mass correspondingly forbidden — nearly two hundred years before John Newton’s birth?
As Tim Larsen noted in the essay that got me onto this subject, “It takes a village” to disseminate ignorance this gross: James Walvin wrote the sentences I have quoted, but no peer reviewer noticed anything wrong, no editor, no copy editor — not one person in the whole complex process at the University of California Press knew enough even to question the claim that an evangelical preacher regularly proclaimed that Jesus Christ is a sinner, or that the average Church of England parish in the eighteenth century featured priests mumbling prayers in Latin. Never at any point was it thought necessary to have a manuscript on an English Christian hymn looked at by someone with an elementary knowledge of English Christianity.
Finally: Why — why, oh why, oh why — do people (scholars especially!) insist on writing books on subjects that they cannot be bothered to learn the basic facts about? Write on something you’re sufficiently interested in to learn about, for heaven’s sake!

P.S. People often ask, “Don’t these presses have fact-checkers?” No. No, they don’t. Many magazines have fact-checkers — the ones at Harper’s, for instance, work me like a dog to justify my every claim — but publishing companies, even academic presses, typically don’t. They hope that their copy-editors — almost always freelancers — will catch howlers, but that’s about it. Certain kinds of books, biographies for instance, will get read by lawyers, but that’s not about avoiding statements that are wrong, that’s about avoiding statements that are actionable. (When I was writing my biography of C. S. Lewis a lawyer-reader flagged a comment I made about Charles Williams’s habit of asking pretty young women to sit on his lap so that his eros could be transformed miraculously into agape — Might Williams take exception to this statement, I was asked. I replied that, since he died in 1945, I didn’t think it likely.)

August 10, 2023

Nick Carr:

Well-turned sentences had a decent run, but after TikTok they’ve become depreciating assets. Traditional word-based culture — and, sure, I’ll stick Twitter into that category — is beginning to look like a feeding ground for vultures. Tell Colleen Hoover to turn out the lights when she leaves.

Part of Nick’s post is about the proposed purchase of Simon & Schuster by one of the nastiest corporations in the world, KKR. Cory Doctorow explains (a) just how vampiric KKR is and (b) why the purchase might not be approved by the FTC.

September 7, 2022

the history of literacy

Mary Harrington:

We can also kiss goodbye to the “marketplace of ideas”. This might have seemed plausible when everyone aspired to long-form, deliberative, rationalism and a broadly shared moral framework. When these are things of the past, we all absorb disaggregated, de-contextualised snippets of information at speed, our reading material rewards us for not concentrating long enough to think something through, and we can see everyone else thinking in real time on our screens?

Ah yes, I remember it well: that halcyon era when everyone sat around reading Hobbes’s Leviathan and earnestly buttonholing passersby in impassioned search for a shared moral framework.

Harrington relies heavily on a melancholy essay by Adam Garfinkle on the subject of Literacy Lost, and for people like Harrington and Garfinkle I have some questions:

Do you know anything — anything at all — about the history of literacy? About what people in any society, any society in the whole world, at any point in history, could read and did read? For instance: what percentage of people in France in 1900, or England in 1850, or China in 1800, or the U.S.A. in 1950, had ever in their lives read a single book? If they had read books, how intellectually demanding and substantive were those books? If they were assigned those books in school, did they actually do the reading? How were the books taught to them? That is, were the best qualities of those books explored in ways that were comprehensible and meaningful to the students? How common, or how rare, was the education in “deep reading” that you commend?

I ask because if you don’t have this information, then you have no business making comparative judgments between our own moment and any moment in the past. And this information is hard to find. What we do know mainly makes us want to know more. You may wish that more people read, and read good books — I certainly do — but without actual data you can’t compare us to our ancestors.

I will just say this: I think the hidden assumption in essays like Harrington’s and Garfinkle’s is that if people weren’t on social media and staring at their iPhones they’d be reading books instead. And I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption.

May 16, 2020

deep literacy?

The problem here is the lack of evidence that “deep literacy” really is in decline. Decline from what height? Starting when? Also:

The rise of deep literacy in enough people in early modernity — mightily aided, of course, by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type — was a precondition of Protestantism’s firm establishment and rapid growth, and its establishment was in turn a major accelerator of deep literacy in the societies in which it became the principal faith community, in large part because Protestants ordained compulsory schooling for all children. The Reformation found a very powerful engine in the establishment of these schools: Wherever Protestant beliefs spread, state-mandated education soon followed, each reinforcing the other.

“Protestants ordained compulsory schooling for all children” — all of them? Everywhere? I don’t think so. When and where did this happen? Perhaps Maryanne Wolf provides evidence for these claims in her book, but if so citations of some kind would have been useful. And in any case Wolf is not a historian. Here’s a widely-cited article from 1984 that asks about the relationship between literacy and the Reformation in Germany. The authors conclude that the early Lutherans weren’t especially interested in promoting general literacy — they devoted themselves to promoting catechesis in schools, and this was done orally — and relatively little progress was made in promoting general literacy until the Pietists in the eighteenth century became influential. And even then the achievements were modest:

Besides reorganizing and revitalizing school systems still suffering from the effects of the Thirty Years War, the eighteenth-century ordinances set targets gradually achieved over time. Indicative of the type of incremental progress that was made are some statistics from East Prussia, one of the poorest rural areas in Germany. The percentage of peasants who could sign their names rose from 10 per cent in 1750, to 25 per cent in 1765, to 40 per cent in 1800. Another sign of increasing literacy was the exponential growth in the book trade in the last half of the eighteenth century as the number of titles for sale at the Leipzig book market, the largest in Germany, increased by over 50 per cent between 1740 and 1770 and more than doubled between 1770 and 1800. To be sure, the increase in literacy and reading in the late eighteenth century was still spotty and varied widely in depth and intensity from place to place. Best estimates of school attendance in the second half of the eighteenth century range from one-third to one-half of German school-age children.

How much deep literacy could there be in an environment in which basic literacy was by no means complete — in some areas not even widespread? That’s just in Germany, of course; comparative study needs to be done to make a more general case.

You can’t effectively make an argument like this without being able to answer some questions:

How, specifically, do we distinguish deep literacy from more basic kinds of literacy?
Where and when have rates of basic literacy been highest?
What data do we have, for any of those places and times, to indicate the proportion of people achieving deep literacy (measured in relation both to basically-literate persons and to the whole population)?

Just to start. And I would ask a deeper and harder-to-answer question: For the overall health of a society, is it the number of people who achieve deep literacy that matters? Or is it the social and political influence of the deeply literate?