Literacy

Literacy, like many other similar concepts, is a construct. This means it does not correspond to a real “thing” in the real world, rather, it is a shorthand for a range of phenomena. For one thing, literacy is always referenced to a community of users. In old times, this was usually common people for whom reading and writing was important. Compared to this community of users, those whose reading (and to a lesser extent writing) skills was deemed to be insufficiently developed were considered to be illiterate. Even in this simple usage of the term, one case see literacy could be a very vague concept, for the fact of matter is that in reality any particular skill (say reading) constitutes a distribution, a range that covers a relatively vast expanse with the majority of people located in the middle. In this context, anyone whose reading (or writing) skill falls below the average of the distribution can be considered “less literate”. We can arbitrarily set a limit and say those who fall below the 10 percentile are illiterate. But even this simplified statistical approach has its own limitations: do we consider someone with great practical knowledge who is not able to put that knowledge in writing illiterate? Obviously our simplified matrix simply does not work for such cases.But even more importantly, the modern society is getting ever more fractured. So it is quite possible (and indeed necessary) to limit the scope of literacy to very specific domains. A great writer who is obviously considered to be literate in the traditional sense may be completely illiterate when it comes to computer and computer usage. On the other hand, a teenager may be very literate when it comes to computers, but completely illiterate when it comes to economy or reading or writing. I think this means we need to carefully limit the scope and range of a concept like literacy, and be careful to use it only in a very limited where it is clearly defined and where all the users clearly know what is meant by it.