Literacy. We use the word to mean the ability to parse text, but it’s not that simple. Roughly 87% of the world’s population can read. Almost a third of those people read in a language that they don’t speak at home.
In becoming literate, in the text-parsing sense, many people enter a world that does not resemble their home life. Things that one would say to a loved one, or intimate details about natural environments, can be unrepresented in text.
Literacy doesn’t only apply to text. Social literacy allows us to connect with peers and move into wider circles. Emotional literacy allows us to understand others and communicate intimacy. Cultural literacy connects us to our past and provides bridges to the future.
When we put a premium on parsing text, at the expense of social, emotional, and cultural literacy, passed on from person to person, something is lost.
The ability to parse text is not the be-all end-all life skill it’s made out to be. Sometimes, it’s actually separating us from our communities. Many of our children who struggle to parse text are actually highly literate in parsing social, emotional, and cultural information, but they are not met there, and their attention is diverted toward text parsing as a kind of ultimatum, ignoring their gifts in social, emotional, and cultural literacy.
Notice any given moment of your life. Is there any text that can touch that? Is there any human relationship that can touch that? In my experience, human relationships are more reliable than text at touching the heart of a moment. That being said, in these times, human relationships are not always as readily accessible as text.
Why is that? I think that this is the crux of our current dilemma.