Literacy is a prerequisite for independence

I’m not sure whether I should thank David Campbell or curse him. A week or so late I came across his post Literacy and have been preoccupied by the topic ever since. Here’s what I put on Twitter and it encapsulates what my thinking has been:

If you are not literate, you cede control over your life to those who are. If that’s not an argument for literacy, I don’t know what is.

I don’t think people are really aware of how much of their every day life depends on what is written. Contracts, for one. If you can’t read, you have to trust someone else to explain what is in it. Laws, electoral platforms and so on – same thing. If the world is inclined to move toward something like video, how do you know what to say and shoot next on that video podcast without a script? Movies and TV use storyboards but what are they if not language?

Letters are signs. Letters in a certain sequence are words, which are signs.

Except for the hardware, everything on our computers is language: the text content we read but also all the coding we usually don’t see. That’s why they refer to programming “languages.”

There are manuals. Business plans. Emails. Licenses. And there is the proverbial “fine print.”

No, we don’t read all these things. But depending on our lives, there are times they become vitally important and it is necessary to understand exactly what is meant. (Lawyers spend their lives niggling over the meaning of laws and a simple phrase, depending on the wording, can change lives.)

And of course, there is written fiction and journalism.

If you are not literate and literate to a certain level, you are not independent. You have to cross your fingers and hope that what someone else is telling you the words mean is what they actually mean. You are dependent.

If people need a reason to learn to read, I think it should be explained to them how much control over their own lives they give up by not being able to read.

My one question regarding Canada’s literacy rates (between provinces) is to what degree are they affected by worker migration? Would provinces like BC and Alberta appear to be performing better on the literacy front due to literate workers from out of province moving to them? And would NB appear worse due to losing skilled workers to other provinces thus making the degree of illiteracy higher? I’m sure, to a degree, it must though I don’t think it would sufficiently to erase the embarrassing rate we have.