Literacy

“ Four groups seem to have formed: those for whom literacy is a skill; those using it as a means for studying values based on literacy; those functioning in a world of pre- packaged literacy artifacts; and those active beyond the limitations of literacy, stretching cognitive boundaries, defining new means and methods of communication and interaction, constituting themselves in practical activities of higher and higher efficiency. ”

“ Where language, through literacy as a generalized medium of interaction, maintained cultural distinctions, such as the ones embodied in our notions of perspective, resemblance, and narration, the new art experience introduced distinctions at the natural level, such as instinct, energy, choice, and change. ”

“ A look at how the course offerings changed over time brings clear evidence that logic, rhetoric, culture, appreciation of the word and of the rules of grammar and syntax-all the values associated with a dominant literacy-are relegated to specializations in philosophy, literature, or written communication, and to a vast, though confusing, repertory of elective classes, which reflect an obsession with free choice and a leveling notion of democracy. ”

“ These are all tasks of high order, requiring a broad perspective and an unbiased viewpoint.
Most important is the comprehension of the structural implications of literacy. An understanding of the framework that led to literacy, and of the consequences that the new pragmatic framework of existence has on all aspects of our lives will help us understand how literacy influenced them. I refer specifically to religion, family, state, and education. In a world giving up the notion of permanency, God disappears for quite a number of people. ”

“ For others, these rules are a means of exploring the wealth of fiction, poetry, history, and philosophy. For a great majority, literacy is but another skill required in high school and college, but not necessarily an essential component of their current and, more important, future lives and work. ”

“ The most vital implications concern our culture as it has been passed down over the centuries through literate expression, laden with values that literacy perpetuates and endows with an aura, in defiance of the new pragmatics and the new scale in which humans operate. ”

“ Literacy brought to culture the means for effectively understanding language in a civilization whose scale was well adapted to the linear nature of writing and reading, and to the logic of truth embodied in language. However, literacy lacks heuristic dimensions, is slow, and of limited interactivity. It rationalizes even the irrational, taking into bureaucratic custody all there is to our life. Common experience, in a limited framework characteristic of the beginning of language notation, is bound to facilitate interpretation and support conflicting choices. ”

“ In effect, the concept of a ‘literate’ is obsolete. In 1951, the Unesco Committee defined a person as literate if he can ‘both read, with understanding, and write a short simple statement on his daily life9. ”

“ This natural aptitude for [91] literature, or, shall we say, rhetoric, which overcomes the disabilities of a poor vocabulary without effort, should direct the manner of instruction we give, ruling out the talky-talky of the oral lesson and the lecture; ruling out, equally, compilations and text-books; and placing books in the hands of children and only those which are more or less literary in character that is, which have the terseness and vividness proper to literary work. The natural desire for knowledge does the rest and the children feed and grow. ”

“ When we reflect, that from our infancy to the natural decline of our intellectual powers, we are employed, during our waking hours, in the exercise of language; [8] —by conversation, often desultory, where we range through a variety of topics, as the bird sports from branch to twig; to the more deliberate act of composition, where the mind enduringly broods on the subject;—or when we read, and attentively consider the thoughts of others:—these occupations contribute to augment our vocabulary, and fix the meaning of the words we employ. ”

“ This, then, it seems, is Culture—knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world—not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment—reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system. ”

“ VISUALIZATION OF LETTER FORMS
It has been said, “The three arts of education are seeing, reading, thinking. The boy who learns to see is awakened; the boy who learns to read is enriched; the boy who learns to think is emancipated.” ”

“ We hear of a new patent cure for the mind or the body, of the new thought of some poet, the new notion of a school of painters; we take in, accept, the idea and for days after every book we read, every person we talk with brings food to the newly entertained notion. ‘Not proven,’ will be the verdict of the casual reader; but [40] if he watch the behaviour of his own mind towards any of the ideas ‘in the air,’ he will find that some such process as I have described takes place; and this process must be considered carefully in the education of children. ”

“ The study of the structure, the form, the author’s purpose, his style, the revelation of the author’s personality, the relation of the piece of literature to the age in which it was written, and a comparison with other pieces of the same type, all give a clearer understanding of literature. The other purpose of the reading is to stimulate the pupils’ interest in good literature, and to lead them to read what is worth while, on their own initiative. ”

“ All these operations of reading, writing, and ciphering, are intellectual tools, whose use should, before all things, be learned, and learned thoroughly; so that the youth may be enabled to make his life that which it ought to be, a continual progress in learning and in wisdom. ”

“ The questions specially proposed to you in my former lecture, namely How and What to Read, rose out of a far deeper one, which it was my endeavor to make you propose earnestly to yourselves, namely, Why to Read I want you to feel, with me, that whatever advantage we possess in the present day in the diffusion of education and of literature, can only be rightly used by any of us when we have apprehended clearly what education is to lead to, and literature to teach. ”

“ Next in importance as branches of education, and prior perhaps in point of time, come the arts of Reading and Writing.—Speech is a valuable gift of Nature, bestowed upon us for the communication of our ideas, and writing is nothing more than a successful imitation of Nature in doing so. The hearing of speech, in like manner, is closely copied in the art of reading. These two arts, therefore, as most successful imitations of Nature, recommend themselves at once to the notice of the teacher as an important branch of education for the young. ”

“ Let the lessons for reading be varied, that the youth may be made acquainted with good styles of all kinds in prose and verse, and the proper manner of reading each kind—sometimes a well-told story, a piece of a sermon, a general's speech to his soldiers, a speech in a tragedy, some part of a comedy, an ode, a satire, a letter, blank verse, Hudibrastic, heroic, &c. But let such lessons be chosen for reading, as contain some useful instruction, whereby the understanding or morals of the youth may at the fame time be improved. ”

“ The aim of the reading must be to enable the pupil to understand each idea as it is presented, to combine these ideas to get the thought of the sentence, and to follow the chain of thought from sentence to sentence until he grasps the meaning of the paragraph, essay, story, or poem, as a whole. As rapidly as the maturity of the pupil permits, other elements that aid in the better understanding of a piece of literature may be considered in connection with the reading. ”

“ Two-fold purpose: Thought-getting and thought-giving in the author’s words. General and Special preparation. Exercises in Enunciation, Pronunciation, Articulation, Vocabulary.
[1]
CHAPTER I
READING AND PUBLIC SPEECH
It is the first and last object of education “to teach people how to think.” When we consider the vast wealth of great thoughts felt and expressed by great men of all times and recorded for us in books, should we not give serious reflection upon what we read and how we read? ”

“ When the thought and the symbol have become so united that each is essential to the other, the problem of learning to read has been solved.
Fundamental Principles. There are three chief fundamental principles involved in the process of learning to read, namely:
First. Images. The thought aspect of language depends upon clear and vivid images. This is so important that unless children have such images they cannot master the symbols which represent them. One purpose of nature study, handicraft, and art is to give children these images.
[Pg 6]
Second. ”

“ Those other faculties, of which I shall speak by and by, and which seem proper to man only, are acquired, and increased by study and industry; and of most men learned by instruction and discipline; and proceed all from the invention of words and speech: for besides sense and thoughts, and the train of thoughts, the mind of man has no other motion, though by the help of speech and method, the same faculties may be improved to such a height, as to distinguish men from all other living creatures.’—Page 11. ”

“ Now this art of telling back is Education and is very enriching. We all practise it, we go over in our minds the points of a conversation, a lecture, a sermon, an article, and we are so made that only those ideas and arguments which we go over are we able to retain. Desultory reading or hearing is entertaining and refreshing, but is only educative here and there as our attention is strongly arrested. ”

“ I offer them simply as reminders, and as a necessary introduction to the remark which I have next to make—that the enlightenment, the education, above all the spirit, derived from this wealth of reading were precisely that sort of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the narrower modern sense. ”

“ And while no two people would agree in drawing the line of aesthetic value which should determine whether any given verbal expression of thought or emotion was literature or not—a fact which is not without importance in the choice of books for forming the taste of our pupils—yet, for the purpose of discussing the place and function of literature in education, we all know well enough what we mean by the word in the general sense which I have attempted to describe. ”

“ What scholarship has agreed upon as the meaning of a word, that must be its meaning for us. Words come and words go, and change with the passing of time. We must seek, then, the sense of the word as used at the time of the work or writer studied. We must, further, determine the classification of the document concerned, whether technical, scientific, or literature for art's sake. ”

“ To endeavor to aid pupils to perceive fully the relation of what they read to themselves and to the society in which they live is part of the legitimate work of the teacher of literature. In a word, while the term is perhaps not the best, I have used the word educational to designate such study as is directed to helping the student to gain from books a wider knowledge of life and human nature. ”

“ In pointing out how imagination and personality can be wrought into one single branch of a man’s education—his relation to books—principles may have been suggested which can be concretely applied by all of us, each in our own department, to the education of the whole man. ”

“ In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both; whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter. ”

“ First, we must form the habit of observing the meanings and values of words, the structure of sentences, of paragraphs, and of entire compositions as we read standard literature―just as we have been trying to form the habit of observing the spelling of words, and the logical relationships of words in sentences. In order that we may know what to look for in our observation we must analyse a little, but we will not imagine that we shall learn to do a thing by endless talk about doing it. ”

“ Learned men shed text-books as the oak sheds acorns, and by their fruits ye shall know them. Open almost any primary text-book or school book in America, and you will, on almost every page of it, find inelegancies of usage, roughnesses, inaccuracies, and occasional errors of grammar. ”

“ But Man, by means of words, has widened the scope of his thinking, remembering, has created philosophy, literature, poetry, painting, has made possible civilization, the industrial era. Vocabulary—the ability to fix his reflex actions into coherent speech—has crowned him supreme among animals. ”

“ They sometimes add to the social the literary element, and a part of the time is occupied with readings, recitations, essays, poems, and the discussion of subjects in history, biography, general literature, and science. These, when carefully managed, are often of great value in advancing the general culture and intelligence, and in calling out, especially in the young, talents which would otherwise be undeveloped. ”