Relationships among literacy, education & culture

The relationships among literacy, education, and culture are several and can be manipulated by a society to promote its cultural legacy from generation to generation. A recent symposium at the Whitney Humanities Center discussed issues related to these relationships and indicated the way education could be shaped to support the dominant culture of Canada against encroachments by outside forces so as to sustain what is considered good and valuable about Canadian culture today. The direct importance of literacy for education should be obvious at all levels of education--literacy is the key to all other disciplines and to all learning. Those who do not learn to read or who do not read at a sufficient level are at a clear disadvantage in the educational process, just as they are at a disadvantage in their society at large. Much of our culture and our society is shut off from those who have not achieved a sufficient level of literacy. We maintain our culture through the written word and extend it to new generations in the same manner. We shape educational practice around literacy levels, and we should also make more effective use of this fact in supporting our cultural life and in perpetuating important cultural institutions and ideas from generation to generation.

Some aspects of culture are clearly perpetuated through an oral tradition, or can be, and yet this is insufficient in a society that has become a literate society. This was noted at the aforementioned Symposiu

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y. Always, though, he emphasizes that literacy and orality both are tools rather than ends in themselves, and he shows how in each generation the primacy of one or the other (depending on the historical context) serves the larger needs of society by introducing the individual into his or her culture and by perpetuating what is seen as the best of that culture from generation to generation. In the West, Goody notes, reading has become associated with self-development in the individual and with progress in groups and society (Symposium 202). Not everyone agrees that literacy has shaped the way we think to any great degree, and Jerome Bruner is one who believes that literacy as such does not have a mighty influence on the use of the mind: Too much depends on the uses to which literacy is put, on the contexts in which literacy is used, and so on. It does not follow that simply by virtue of a message being pout into a literate form it will therefore stimulate us to brood upon its alternative interpretations (Symposium 204). Yet this can mean merely that literacy is part of a given cultural context and that the two together shape the way we think, and this does seem to be the case. Literacy in the West and Literacy in, say, Ch

Category: Psychology - R