Literacy

Literacy. Historically, literacy has meant the ability to read and/or write at a certain level of competence. But conceptions of literacy and its uses have been closely tied to specific historical contexts. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, before European settlers reached North America, the term litteratus, or “lettered,” meant competence in Latin and was associated with the clergy or the aristocracy. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus had shifted from Latin to vernacular languages, and the equation of literacy with aristocratic or clerical rank had been broken, despite the continuing complaints of cultural elites about the spread of literacy to the lower order.

Definitions and measures of literacy, especially for comparative purposes, are notoriously difficult. Until the mid–nineteenth century, signatures or marks on wills, petitions, or other documents offered the most direct and widest evidence of literacy or the lack thereof. In more recent times, censuses, school records, and various educational and “literacy” tests have been used. All measures, however, remain problematic and controversial.

Many researchers have treated literacy as a gauge of social, political, or cultural development. For some, it is a sign of modernity. In other interpretations, literacy has symbolic, ideological, and even mythic value. Interpretations of its meaning often conflict. In American history, literacy has been linked to the advancement of individuals and groups, but it has also been used to maintain inequalities associated with social class, race, gender, and other factors. Researchers, therefore, must consider literacy not as a neutral and abstract skill, but in relation to the value accorded to reading and writing by society at large or by particular subgroups in successive time periods. These values, in turn, have influenced the institutional resources that have been allocated to the spread or restriction of literacy. Legislatures in the antebellum South, for example, often made it illegal to teach a slave to read or write.

These distinctions divide American historians as they have divided Americans historically. For example, historians long assumed, with scant evidence, that the mainland North American British colonies, and then the United States, were more literate than Europe. Recent research has both confirmed and qualified this received wisdom. Colonial Era literacy levels, ranging from perhaps 50–60 to more than 90 percent for European immigrants and their descendents, were, indeed, high by European standards, but not unprecedentedly so. Literacy levels tended to reflect the levels of the regions from which the emigrants came and to reproduce existing social differences. Excepting enslaved Africans, literate individuals were more likely to emigrate, giving America a long‐standing social and developmental advantage. Yet, as literacy became more common and valued, it intertwined with the oral in American culture.

Religion—first a Protestantism rooted in individual access to the Bible—was long a spur to literacy, along with the desire for economic and social progress and concerns for social control and national status. Residents of New England and the Old Northwest particularly endorsed and diffused literacy. For many reasons, literacy was more restricted in the South and among racial and some ethnic minorities. Women's rates of literacy increased rapidly in the nineteenth century. African Americans and members of other minority groups waged impressive struggles for literacy. Over time, public schools increasingly took on responsibility for literacy training, replacing less formal ways of learning to read and write. As the literacy levels of virtually all groups rose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literacy's symbolic role as a marker of class distinctions declined.

Concerns about literacy have also masked a nativist desire to restrict the immigration of ethnic groups considered undesirable. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Immigration Restriction League repeatedly urged Congress to impose a literacy test for immigrants, as a means of controlling and reducing the influx of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe.

In the late twentieth century, issues related to literacy continued to stir intense controversy. Many observations and tests suggested that levels of “functional” literacy were dangerously low. Debate raged over whether Asian American and Hispanic American immigrant children should be taught in English or in their own languages, and over the establishment of English as the official national language. The rise of the new electronic media and the recognition of diverse modes of understanding and communicating suggested that the concept of literacy itself needed to be reexamined. Conservatives trumpeted their fears of an endangered “cultural literacy.”

But such controversies were hardly new. Throughout U.S. history, literacy has been a source of controversy and contention. What seemed clear, as the century ended, was that there are many forms of “literacy,” and that the whole issue would likely remain a volatile arena of ideological contestation.
See also Education: The Public School Movement; Immigration Law; Mobility; Nativist Movement; Slavery: Development and Expansion of Slavery.

Bibliography

Lawrence A. Cremin , American Education, 3 vols., 1970–1988.
Daniel H. Calhoun , The Intelligence of a People, 1973.
Harvey J. Graff , The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth‐Century City, 1979, reprint 1991.
Lee Soltow and and Edward Stevens , The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870, 1981.
Harvey J. Graff , The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Society and Culture, 1987.
Mike Rose , Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared, 1989.
Carl Kaestle et al. , Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880, 1991.

Harvey J. Graff