culture is relative to the following: Whose culture?; whose values?; whose religion?
Of all the symposium contributors, Christopher Miller comes closest to stating the relative nature of literacy with regard to education and culture. Miller (Symposium, 1988, p. 226) cites Goody and Watt's (1968, p. 29) "The Consequences of Literacy" to note the authors' view that exclusively oral [read: primitive] societies possess a relative "'totality of symbol-referent relationships'" that preclude them from the higher order functions of abstraction, highly developed logic, and the power of the pen in general.
Miller (Symposium, 1988, p. 226) interprets Goody's assertion that "traditional" [read: primitive] oral societies who are pen-less even lack a symbolic phallus. The tool of writing is seen as so powerful that those societies restricted to oral communication are eunuch-like in their inability to grow and prosper. Miller (Symposium, 1988, p. 226) observes that Goody (1977), in his failure to avoid value-neutral terminology, has made oral thought subject to the ratification of the written word. Goody's avoidance of the terminology of colonial oppression--he couches relative terms like "logic," "objective," and "traditional" in quotation marks to show his objective distance--comes off as transparent and shallow. In his zeal to glorify the written word over the spoken word, his smoke screen of apparent objectivity disappears, and he is revealed as another colonialist with a political agenda. The savages must be colonized and taught to read and write; otherwise, they will never come to realize the power and glory of the written word--it is almost like seeing God.
To see literacy as an unqualified good, as Goody and Watt do--to ascribe transcendent properties to the ability to encode and decode the written word--is untenable. As Miller (Symposium, 1988) points out, Goody and Watt have created an ideological schism out of the literac...