Evolution of literacy

Although Myers' Changing Our Minds was extremely dense and I sometimes wondered how I was going to get through it all, it was actually pretty interesting. I struggle with synthesizing all of this information in a blog, not knowing where exactly to start, so I guess I'll just write about what struck me about the evolution of literacy.

Myers poses the question early on, “when, how, and why do people shift from one literacy to another?” (16) So, I thought I could let that guide my post to give me a little direction. First, when. Well, from what I can gather the type of literacy we teach in our public schools seems to change every 75 years, give or take a few. According to Myers, these time periods also represent a change in social needs. So, if we try to discover the pattern, we should be up for another shift around 2058. Any predictions on what society will be like then and what our needs will be?

How? I didn’t really find an answer to this question. I read from chapter to chapter following the chronological progression, but I don’t feel like Myers really let us in on HOW exactly these changes ended up taking place. Well, I mean, it’s not like one day “the powers that be” just informed all teachers that we were going to change the way we teach. It had to be gradual. So, even though some teachers may value tradition and work within the decoding/analytic model now, I think more and more of us are seeing the value of expecting higher-order thinking skills through translation/critical literacy. Nevertheless, I also agree with Myers in that, “a new form of literacy will not alone improve schools” (299). I think that the traditional structure of factory schools, introduced by Cubberly, will also need to be changed for students to truly receive the benefits of translation/critical literacy. Likewise, I feel that we must address the inequity and segregation in our school system if we are going to improve the abilities of all students and stop sorting and pushing students out of school, a shameful act of the past.

Finally, the why. Well, while Myers accredits the changes in literacy to our changing social needs, I’ve also come to the conclusion that people’s ideas of what these social needs are and what students need to succeed will always be different. Thus, views of what should be taught in our English classes will always be different. This is quite obvious in Myers’ introduction where he outlines the educational beliefs of five different groups in our society. I also thought it was interesting how Myers mentions that he doesn’t believe public rhetoric alone will create change in our public education system. He says we must connect a change to a specific social need, providing the example of our desire for a reduced class size (78). I personally think public discourse about these issues is the first step. And, I wish that simply connecting a desired change to a social need would, in fact, implement that change, but I think it’s much more complicated than that. While politicians should be listening to the public, it appears that most people are caught up in results, numbers, and standards, neglecting the educational process and the 100-year old structure that students are forced to participate in daily. So, the big question: how do we shift this public interest?

I know this is already a long post, but there is so much more to talk about – the role of culture in our literacy practices, inequity in our school system related to social class and race, literacy’s connection to power, etc. Yet, I will leave that for another time. Even though this book was a little difficult to navigate, one concept I did gain is that literacy holds a more complicated definition than to simply “read and write”.