Reading and writing are seen as basic
necessities in advanced societies. If we compare First and Third World
countries, the ability to read and write is considered a defining factor in their
economic and social achievements.
Countries with populations lacking reading and writing skills are seen
as functioning from a deficit, contributing to a lack of advancement, both
within the country and internationally. While every country has literate and
non-literate populations, the social and economic success, status, achievement
and progress in that country is tied to the literate population. In First World
countries, basic literacy is a necessity for a functioning workforce and is the
first step towards the foundation of higher skills that promote competition and
innovation, helping to secure the economy and general prosperity. Success in
any country, industry, field, business or endeavor is tied to literacy capabilities,
and international business, trade and governance rests on the literate class.
While Third World countries function with large non-literate populations, their
skills are limited to non-literate tasks, which limits the kinds of businesses
that can grow and expand. These countries must provide literacy to at least a
portion of the population in order to engage with First World countries
economically, socially and politically. It is also understood that reading and
writing, in helping to develop a skilled people, helps raises the standard of
living, and provides more economic growth potential for a country. The changing
status of previously Third World countries to more First World status is
directly related to their abilities to create a literate, and therefore
skilled, population. Basic literacy skills in a country become the pivot between
progress and lack of it.
This is why the division of a population
between those that are literate and those that are non-literate is called the Great Divide, as “…highly literate
societies and highly literate people appear to have economic, political, and
social advantages over those who are not literate or not as literate...” (Wiley
p.31). This theory is also called the Cognitive Divide Theory, as the mental
processes that are attributed to the development of literacy abilities are seen
as a major factor in this division. As Reder and Davila (2005) state, “...there
are fundamental and far-reaching cognitive differences between literate and
non-literate societies and individuals” (p.170). The cognitive processes associated
with literacy are seen as more analytic, critical and organizational,as the
written word created deeper abilities for sorting, ascribing, detailing,
delving and systematizing. Therefore, the division in the Cognitive Divide Theory is not only between the literate and
non-literate, but also between the mental processes developed in each
population.
The Cognitive
Divide Theory developed in the 1960’s through a variety of disciplines and
their studies. These disciplines ranged from the social sciences, psychology,
anthropology, philosophy and history. Their connections to language and
literacy brought more attention to these areas, influencing deeper subsequent
studies. Anthropologists,
historians and philosophers studying social norms brought literacy and its
development more to the forefront, while social sciences and psychology focused
on individuals and their connections to language and literacy.
Notable society-focused
studies included Claude Levi-Strauss’s The
Savage Mind (1962), which maintained that there is no intrinsic distinction
between a “savage” mind and a “civilized” mind; Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963), about how
Western civilization’s advancement changed drastically when the Greeks’ adapted
an alphabetic writing system; Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), which presented cognitive development and
organizational advancements as coming from the literate technologies
(alphabetics, printing and electronics); and Jack Goody & Ian Watt’s The Consequences of Literacy (1963), bringing
in the idea of a set of mental attributes tied to reading and writing, concluding
that writing establishes a deeper form of ascribing meaning, as well as the means to develop a depth of
study of abstract subjects. As they saw it, “…[I]t is difficult to believe that
such a large and complex series of arguments as are presented in The Republic, for instance, or in
Aristotle’s Analytics, could possibly
be created, or delivered, much less completely understood, in oral form” (p.
330). These studies of language helped to validate a perspective of a binary
division in populations, promoting an orientation emphasizing the virtues of
literacy, eclipsing the harder to uncover traits of non-literate peoples, creating
an imbalanced outlook.
Subsequent individual-focused
studies of literacy, like Patricia M. Greenfield’s Oral of Written Language: The Consequences for Cognitive Development in
Africa, the United States and England (1972), that showed how oral language
contexts and written language contexts in different cultural groups of Africa,
England and the US connected to different educational approaches and cognitive development; David R. Olson’s From Utterances to Text: The Bias of
Language in Speech and Writing (1977), which examined the issues around
meaning, comprehension, acquisition, reasoning and reading, bringing in a
framework of “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” in order to study meaning more
closely; and Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole’s
Literacy Without Schooling:
Testing for Intellectual Effects (1978,) a study of the Vai people of
Liberia who developed their own syllabic writing system and were literate without
schooling. These studies brought in evidence challenging the Great Divide Theory with new, critical evidence.
As language studies began research into the
acquisition and implementation of literacy, the assumptions about a cognitive
set of skills stemming from literacy as being more advanced came into question.
The daily use of language was examined,
as opposed to the history of linguistics , and some of the evidence was at
odds. As these studies brought in more complex pictures with mixed evidence,
the perspective of the Cognitive Divide
Theory began to appear simplistic,
resulting from a more dominant culture perspective, the First World.
There was also debate and complexity around
the question of cognitive development itself. Factors such as schooling made things
complicated to track and separate when studying the effects of reading and
writing on individuals and societies and how it relates to mental development. Could literacy be
an effect of schooling in general? If so, is school also responsible for the
cognitive skills associated with literacy? Does cognitive development come from
understanding an alphabetic system? These questions were investigated by scholars
from a variety of disciplines, exploring these questions. Shirley Brice Heath’s
study, What No Bedtime Story Means:
Narrative Skills at Home and School (1982) brought in a multi-faceted
perspective on forms of literacy, its acquisition, accommodation, and
definition. In three distinct communities, Heath tracked parents and their
children and how literacy was introduced into their lives before schooling, and
what the effects were when they began school; she questioned the efficacy of
separating reading activities into skills and activities removed from the
communities the children come from. A rich array of oral and literate practices
were revealed, shining a light on the language inter-relatedness between
literacy and community values and beliefs.
Three perspectives on literacy acquisition
that have contributed to the debate on the Cognitive
Divide Theory are: the autonomous
model of literacy, which sees literacy as a set of formal skills such as
decoding and encoding, that is individually acquired, allowing an individual to
master the demands of reading and writing; the ideological model, which looks more closely at the political
underpinnings of the learning experience, and asks how the particular setting
and power structures involved contribute to the acquisition of literacy (Street
1984). The social practices model,
which presents the social context and its demands as dictating the terms by
which literacy is acquired. There is also critical
literacy, similar to the ideological, which brings in a more assertive role
in pedagogy, demanding that the context of the power structure be brought into
learning and confronted in order to move forward (Papen p.10). Each of these has a particular perspective not
only on literacy acquisition, but also on how cognitive skills such as analysis
and logic are tied to literacy.
The autonomous orientation is associated
with Goody and Watt and the “pastness of the past”, linking objectivity to the
acquisition of specific literacy skills. The scholar Walter Ong has contributed
to this model as well, as his research of oral societies shows how mnemonics
and memory perpetuates social needs, keeping a narrativized, indistinct
relation to thought, promoting easier social equilibrium (Ong p.20); the
changes in thought brought on by literate societies allows for detachment, distinctions,
an adherence to linear time referencing, abstractions and intellectual exploration
(Ong p. 26). Goody’s study of lists as facets of cognitive development, enabling
classification and deeper memory, illustrates how in earlier times “the
list…utilized as a teaching device as well as an instrument of learning, so
that every schoolchild...learns where he should place ‘dew’ in relation to
heaven and earth” (Goody p. 47). Both these scholars supported the idea that
the cognitive development from literacy was of a different order from orality,
giving credence and validity to the autonomous
approach, tracing literacy to a specific set of skills that can be objectively
acquired, developed and utilized, separate from social or cultural contexts.
Paul Gee and Brian Street are two scholars associated with
the ideological and social practices orientation that is
critical of the Cognitive Divide Theory. Both
identify a dominant social criteria in the theory, where claims of cognitive
benefits of literacy “privilege one social group’s ways of doing things as if
they were natural and universal.” (Gee p.731).
Brian Street says, “The autonomous approach is simply imposing western
conceptions of literacy on to other cultures or within a country those of one
class or cultural group onto others.” (p. 2)
Critical literacy,
defined by Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, whose aim of not only ‘reading the word’ but also ‘reading the
world’, stresses understanding the power structures underlying society and how
to transform them, is embodied by New Literacies Studies. This approach looks
at how society influences and wields power and oppression; social justice and
emancipation are pedagogical aims (Papen p.11).
This is in opposition to
functional or basic literacy,
which “emphasizes the individual and their literacy deficits as the underlying
problem.” (Papen p.10).
Social practices
theory, focusing on the social applications of literacy learning, emphasizes
the uses of these practices in specific, social settings (Wiley p.33). Shirley Brice Heath, Street and Scribner and
Cole emphasize the need to bring in the setting, its power structure and
influence, and the cultural values of the population before a comprehensive
approach to the study of literacy and the implementation of literacy
acquisition can progress. Scribner and
Cole (1978) concluded the great divide between the cognitive development of
oral and literate cultures was really an analysis of specific tasks; the aspect
of schooling interfered with fully understanding literacy outcomes.
There is much debate as to the merits of a
school system and its pedagogical approach to literacy. Ideologically oriented
scholars such as McDermott (1987a 1987b) maintain that “schools have become a
socially sanctioned mechanism that ascribes a lower status to [the students].”
In response, Erickson (1984) has held that “literacy not only promotes prestige
of the literate but also promotes strategic power for them, because it involves
mastery of a communication system” (Wiley p.47). Yet Erickson also concludes,
“From a sociocultural point of view, literacy, reasoning and civility as daily
school practices cannot be associated or reordered apart from the fabric of
society in which those practices take place” (Erickson 1984 pp. 543-544).
It seems the Cognitive Divide Theory, initially
illuminating the need to bring literacy to non-literate populations in order to
increase their social and economical opportunities, also brought in a host of
assumptions and generalizations that now no longer serves to promotes social
well-being through education as once believed, as they inflict the dominant,
First World culture perspective on an increasingly multi-lingual,
multi-cultural blendings of populations. These populations have their own
traditions that are not so easily understood or utilized, but which need to be integrated
in order for a full literate potential to be realized. The currently expanding
discourse on literacy acquisition continues to shift and change, with a growing
understanding that we are in the midst of a transition, where the simplistic,
binary perspectives that functioned in the 60s and 70s is no longer applicable.
Further research and expansion is necessary.
Works Cited:
Brice Heath, Shirley. “What No Bedtime Story Means:
Narrative Skills at Home and School.” Language
in Society, Volume 11, Issue 01. Cambridge University Press.
(April 1982) pp 49-76.
Gee, J. P. “Orality and Literacy: From the Savage Mind to Ways With Words.” TESOL Quarterly, 20: (1986) pp. 719–746.
Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Apr., 1963) pp. 304-345
Greenfield, Patricia M.
“Oral of Written Language: The Consequences for Cognitive Development in
Africa, the United States.” Language and
Speech, April 1972 vol. 15 no. 2 169-178
Harvard Educational
Review, 47, 3. (1977) pp.
257-81.
Olson, David R. “From Utterance to
Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing.”
Reder, Stephen and Davila, Erica. “Context and Literacy Practices.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2005) 25, pp. 170–187.
Scribner, Sylvia and Cole, Michael. “Literacy
without Schooling: Testing for Intellectual Effects.” Harvard Educational Review, v48 n4 (1978) pp. 448-61.
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