Olson 1994

Demythologizing Literacy

assumptions about literacy:

1. "writing is the transcription of speech" (3)
2. "the superiority of writing to speech" (3)
3. "the technological superiority of the alphabetic writing system" (4)
4. "literacy as the organ of social progress" (5)
5. "literacy as an instrument of cultural and scientific development" (6)
6. "literacy as an instrument of cognitive development" (7)

debunks each

"What is required is a theory or set of theories of just how literacy relates to language, mind and culture. No such theory currently exists perhaps because the concepts of both ltieracy and thinking are too general and too vague to bear such theoretical burdens." (13)

overviews earlier theories: Weber, Levy-Bruhl; Toronto School of McLuhan, Havelock, Innis

failure of earlier theories: focus on ways of writing (form of the script); Olson focuses on ways of reading -- problems of interpretation rise from what texts fail to represent; wants to show "how our understanding of the world, that is our science, and our understanding of ourselves, that is, our psychology, are by-products of our ways of interpreting and creating written texts, of living in a world on paper" (19)

Theories of Literacy and Mind: From Levy-Bruhl to Scribner and Cole

Scribner and Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (1981); laid to rest arguments of Toronto School by showing no cognitive effects from introduction of script into a society

we're all cognitively the same; can't map Piagetian development of children onto cultures (21-2)

Levy-Bruhl: "traditional thought had difficulty managing the relation between thing and representation of a thing, believing that the representation carried some of the properties of the thing represented, a relation which is technically referred to as metonymy" (28)

• metaphor and metonymy not always distinguished

"attitudes to writing do suggest that a conceptual boundary between the words and their meanings or texts and their messages has been redrawn under the impact of a ltierate tradition. That boundary, again, is between the representation and what is represented or, more precisely, between metonymy and metaphor." -- for literates, that division is distinct; for non-literates, not much distinction between metonymy and metaphor (32-3)

Scribner and Cole: challenge earlier Toronto School findings, show non-literate people sometimes have same ability to reason as literate; distinguish schooling from literacy

• Goody challenges; says ability to reason logically has more to do with literacy within a particular discourse (i.e. syllogistic logic) than ability to read/write (40)
  • just learning to read and write doesn't initiate one into all the possible discourses or affordances of reading and writing (42)

"Literacy in Western cultures is not just learning the abc's; it is learning to use the resources of writing for a culturally defined set of tasks and procedures." (43)

Literacy and Conceptual Revolutions

two major conceptual revolutions: ancient Greece c5-3BC and European Renaissance, c12-17; what if any role did writing have in these revolutions? (45-6)

Greek literacy

Havelock: alphabet allowed Greeks to become literate culture; W. Harris: no mass literacy in Greek culture, though by 70AD ~20% literacy among males in urban settings (47)

written laws appear ~620BC, then increasing dependence on written law and evidence (47)

Lloyd: Greeks had something like a scientific revolution -- tried to note a "magical" category and remove it from certain discourses (49-50); Thus the achievement is less a matter of research, proof or magic than an oppositional set of concepts that allow these things to be seen as proof, research or magic" (51)

compared with Chinese at the same time -- very different attitudes toward writing (51-2); "any understanding of literacy will have to pay attention to the structure of the culture into which it is introduced" (52)

Renaissance literacy

Clanchy: increasing use of written documents in English law from Norman conquest (1066) to death of Edward I (1307); Street suggests legal changes had more to do with the political changes -- Normans wanted to establish control over their conquered subjects (55)

Eisenstein: print allowed science to create reproducible diagrams, placed Scripture in the hands of every reader

• but (Olson argues) what if it wasn't a change in writing, but changes in the ways of reading?