A few weeks ago, I was on Facebook, and this woman – Shawna – had posted in a parenting group asking for help with installing her son’s car seat.
Shawna said that the car seat came with an instruction manual,
but that she’s “not good with instructions so she needs something simple and to the point.”
The comments were…less than helpful.
They said things like “this is what happens when idiots have children,” and
“she’s the reason her kids are gonna die in a car crash 🤷”, and “she’s either illiterate or just fucking lazy.”
There were hundreds of comments, and most of them were negative.
After all of this, Shawna left a final response before she deleted the post:
“This is my child. I asked for help with the car seat, not me reading.
Bye. Find something better to do if you don’t have no help.”
So… the thing is… this was posted in a more progressive parenting group. A group with rules like,
“Be Kind and Courteous” and “No Racism, Sexism, or any other -ism”…
And yet…
Here were these so-called progressive, “woke” people making fun of a woman for her struggles with reading and writing.
Isn’t there something… wrong with that?
Today, I want to investigate literacy. Why “illiterate” is used as an insult, why it shouldn’t be,
and why illiteracy is a social justice issue that needs to be taken seriously.
So, consider this a callout video, where we – the woke brigade – are getting “illiterate” #Cancelled.
[snazzy, jazzy do-wop slinks in quietly through the side door]
So, let’s start with defining “literacy.”
We often use it to mean the ability to read and write, but it can also mean knowledge
in a specific area (like internet literacy, or saying someone is “politically literate”).
These definitions are the most common ones, and there’s nothing… super wrong with them,
but I would like to use more nuanced definitions during this video.
So, here’s UNESCOs definition:
“Beyond its conventional concept as a set of reading, writing and counting skills, literacy is now understood as a means of identification, understanding,
interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world.”
The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies defines literacy as:
“understanding, evaluating, using and engaging with written text to participate in the society, to achieve one's goals and to develop one's knowledge and potential.”
The final definition, this one from the Ministry of Education of Alberta, Canada, says that literacy is
“the ability, confidence and willingness to engage with language to acquire, construct and communicate meaning in all aspects of daily living.”
So, literacy isn’t just the ability to read or write, but wanting to do it, being confident in it,
and using reading and writing to do things for yourself and for your society. Literacy is complex, but it’s also fragile.
Reading and writing aren’t skills like learning how to ride a bike. Once you learn how to ride a bike, you don’t forget it.
That’s… like… the thing people say.
Literacy is more like… math. So, you have the basics – addition, subtraction, multiplication,
etc. – and everything kind of grows off of that.
Y’know, you can’t really do calculus unless you know algebra first.
But, if you don’t constantly practice those concepts, you lose them.