Awareness of possibilities is more direct than that of
complexities. Trading choice and self-determination for less
concern and higher rewards in terms of satisfying needs and
desires is not an exciting alternative. Language has not brought
the promised awareness of the world, but has made possible a
strategy of confinement. The loss of language seems to trouble
mainly people who work at language dissemination, maintenance,
and awareness. However, after taking language for granted for a
long time, people notice those instances when, in need of a word
or trying to function in a world of language conventions,
language is not up to the task. Faced with unprecedented
experiences in scientific experimentation, large-scale
communication, radical political change, and terrorism, people
observe that they do not have the language for these phenomena.
They look for words and ultimately realize that those words,
assumed to exist, cannot be found because the pragmatic framework
requires something other than language. In contrast to tools,
like the ones we keep around the house or see mechanics and
plumbers using, language is not taken away or lost because we
are our language. What is lost from language is a certain
dimension of human being and acting, of appropriating reality
and producing and exchanging goods, of acknowledging our
experience and sharing it with others.
Cultural, historical, economic, social, and other developments
contribute to our notion of literacy. Its crisis is symptomatic
of everything that made literacy necessary and is based on the
particular ways in which literate societies function. This
statement does not suggest that the crisis of literacy implies a
cultural or economic crisis. For instance, women's emancipation
did not start with the emancipation of language. In Japanese, in
which the man-woman distinction goes so far as to require that
women use a different vocabulary than men, women's emancipation
could hardly be considered. As an expression of a specific type
of social relations, this distinction in language maintains a
status against which women might feel entitled to react.
Many other patterns of human interaction, which prompt practical
action for change, are deeply seated in language. Watching our
children, upon whom we impose literacy, grow, we almost always
count the words they learn and evaluate their progress in
articulating desires, opinions, and questions. What we neglect
to ask is what kind of world does language bring to them in the
process of learning language? What kind of practical experiences
does language make possible? When children break loose of our
language, it is almost too late to understand the problem.
Language use seems so natural that its syntactic and
value-loaded conventions are not questioned. We accept language
as it is projected on us. It comes with gods or God, goodness,
right, truth, beauty, and other values, as well as distinctions
(sexual, racial, generational) that are held to be as eternal as
we were taught that language itself is. We project language on
our children only in order to be challenged by them through their
own language, pretty much attuned to their different pragmatic
frame of reference.
As a framework within which parents, and ultimately society, want
children to think, communicate, and act, language appears to
have two contradictory characteristics: liberty and constraint.
The all-encompassing change we are witnessing concerns both. In
order to function effectively in a society of very specialized
patterns of interaction, people realize that a trade-off between
liberties and constraints is inescapable. On the level of social
and cultural life, people realize that constraints, represented
by accepted prejudices and ideologies, impinge upon their limited
space of decision-making and infringe upon individual integrity.
Language turned out to be not only the medium for expressing
liberating ideals, but also a stubborn embodiment of old and new
prejudices. It is also the instrument of deception, and bears in
its ideal of literacy the most evident deception of all-literacy
as a panacea for every problem the human species faces, from
poverty, inequity, and ignorance to military conflict, disease,
starvation, and even the inability to cope with new developments
in science and technology. Interestingly enough, Netizens
believe the same thing regarding the Internet! In their campaign
for free choice of literacy, they are just as dogmatic about
their type of literacy as the Modern Language Association, for
example, is about the old-fashioned kind.
We can accept that this world of enormously diversified forms of
human practice (corresponding to the diversity of human beings)
requires more than one type of literacy. But this is not yet
sufficient condition for changing the current premise of
education if the avenues of gaining knowledge are not developed.
The assumption that language is a higher level system of signs
is probably correct, but not necessarily significant for the
inference that in order to function in a society, each member has
to master this language. To free ourselves of this inference
will take more than the argument founded on the efficiency of
illiterate and aliterate individuals who constitute their
identity in realms where literacy does not dominate, or ceased
being entirely necessary.