Brandt: Accumulating Literacy

...what is unprecedented about literacy learning (and teaching) in the current climate is not so much a demand for literacy that seems chronically to outstrip supply, but rather the challenges faced by all literacy learners in a society whose rapid changes are themselves tied up so centrally with literacy and its enterprises. (651)

The piling up and extending out of literacy and its technologies (651)

Contemporary literacy learners--across positions of age, gender, race, class, and language heritage--find themselves having to piece together reading and writing experiences from more and more spheres, creating new and hybrid forms of literacy where once there might have been fewer and more circumscribed forms. What we calculate as a rising standard of basic literacy may be more usefully regarded as the effects of a rapid proliferation and diversification of literacy. And literate ability at the end of the twentieth century may be best measured as a person's capacity to amalgamate new reading and writing practices in response to rapid social change. (651)

However, because changes in the twentieth century have become so much more rapid, the ideological texture of literacy has become more complex as more layers of earlier forms of literacy exist simultaneously within the society and within the experiences of individuals. (652)

In addition to this vertical accumulation, literacy has literally spread out across the century, reorganizing an array of economic, legal, political, and domestic activities. The increased powers accorded to print have sharpened the need for reading and, increasingly, writing to navigate life. For one thing, the mass of American workers has had to shift from growing food to manufacturing goods to, principally, managing information. Consequently, as James Beniger, Manuel Castells, and Peter Drucker, among others, have demonstrated, the ability to earn a living has become increasingly bound up with the ability to read, document, and traffic in symbol systems generally. Documentary practices have penetrated banks, courts, hospitals, schools, social service agencies, and other public and private organizations. As a result, the capacity of citizens to protect and exercise their civil rights and to claim their fair share of public resources depends critically on the skills of reading and writing. (652)

to trace the effects of accumulating literacy through the contours of individual lives. (653)

shift in the ideological basis for literacy (653)

Piling up of Literacy:

The accounts suggest that while a society's older forms of literacy may be super- seded by new ones, the old ones don't disappear.Print lasts and artifacts accumulate--that is their appeal and power--littering the material sites of subsequent literacy learning and shaping future interpretations of reading and writing. (659)

literacy in an advanced literate period requires an ability to work the borders between tradition and change, an ability to adapt and improvise and amalgamate. (660)

Rapid changes in literacy and education may not so much bring rupture from the past as they bring an accumulation of different and proliferating pasts, a piling up of literate artifacts and signifying practices that haunt the sites of literacy learning. (665)

FRAMING QUOTE:

These characteristics of accumulating literacy could be better accommodated in school, simply by beginning to recognize the historical conditions of literacy more fully and consciously. Traditionally, schools have seen their mission as disseminating literacy to each new generation, but what does that mean in a culture where sources of print and literacy-not to mention education itself-are so ubiquitous? (665)

We can also begin to see how the role of the school in an advanced literate age can be reconceptualized to help students at all levels detect the residual, emergent, often conflicted contexts of literacy that form their world. (666)

Important too is the realization that the history of literacy at any moment is always carrying along a complex, sometimes cacophonous mix of fading and ascending materials, practices, and ideologies. Literacy is always in flux. Learning to read and write necessitates an engagement with this flux, with the layers of literacy's past, present, and future, often embodied in materials and tools and just as often embodied in the social relationships we have with the people who are teaching us to read and write. Indeed, as changes in literacy have speeded up in the twentieth century, literate ability has become more and more defined as the ability to position and reposition oneself amidst literacy's recessive and emergent forms. (666)

But at this point in the investigation I lean, with M. M. Lewis, toward the proposition that problems with reading and writing are less about the lack of literacy in society than about the surplus of it. Being literate in the late twentieth century has to do with being able to
negotiate that burgeoning surplus. (666)