Next to
‘schooling for all’, ‘100% literacy’ is seen as a sublime value. Literacy is
just a skill among other skills - including farming, bamboo weaving, textile
weaving, making pots, tanning. Yes, in today’s world it is a needed functional
skill. But that is all.
It is just
that reading/writing is OUR skill set, and we have glorified that. And we make
highly skilled communities seem unskilled because we measure them in our
paradigm.
We the
'schooled and colleged' divided the world into literates and illiterates, and
took it on ourselves to teach literacy to all, and 'develop' them. The weaver did not arrogantly divide the
world into weaving-literate and weaving-illiterate, look down on us, and insist
on 'developing' us. Only we are uncouth enough to go and
tell them that they are 'alphabet illiterate' and try to 'give them alphabet
literacy'. Thanks to us, the wise farmer says apologetically that
he 'is just a farmer', and dreams that his son will be a clerk or a typist.
Actually, with literacy, maybe our
ability to memorize, remember, contemplate all come down. We depend completely
on the written word. I see myself as intellectually inferior to my neighbours,
dalit, landless, poor and unschooled, Eashwaramma, Annasamy Anna, Lakshmamma in
clarity of thinking, expression, memory, perception. I, the letterred, need a pen and paper to
'note' down their sayings, because I lack an understanding and perception that
is in their very fabric. I also lack their memory. Through vast memory and a
deep inherited culture they hold and protect more knowledge and wisdom than
literates. I think my village people see
us - as literate ignorants, though they are too civilized to let us feel it, or
to even think it to themselves. When and why did literacy become such a
superior skill?
............
"Our real concern is with the fallacy involved in the attachment of an absolute value to literacy, and the very dangerous consequences that are involved in the setting up of “literacy” as a standard by which to measure the cultures of unlettered peoples.
Our blind faith in literacy not only obscures for us the significance of other skills, so that we care not under what subhuman conditions a man may have to learn his living, if only he can read, no matter what, in his hours of leisure.
it is also one of the fundamental grounds of inter-racial prejudice and becomes a prime factor in the spiritual impoverishment of all the “backward” people whom we propose to “civilise.”
- Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Bugbear of Literacy
The illiterates are rooted in their infinite learnings and memory.
The literates wander around with paper and pen, writing and forgetting. And reading and forgetting.
I appreciate these thoughts very much. I have often wondered along these lines as I homeschool my children over the years. I want them to develop in a balanced way which is perhaps impossible with so much emphasis on reading and book work and all that that implies. Thank you. I hope you will share further thoughts on this vital subject. Leslie at The Lionsgate School USA
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