Literacy (re-)Defined

Definitions of many things change over time. Literacy is something for which the popular definition really has not changed much even though the academic definition has. I would wager that most people, when asked about literacy, think almost exclusively about reading and writing. Clearly, a person who cannot read is illiterate as is a person who cannot write and a person who can do neither is still illiterate. But what about a person who can read and can write? Is that person automatically considered to be literate just based on those two skills? And at what point in the development of these skills would a person be considered literate? Shouldn't our definition of literacy have something to do with the ability to communicate? And if so, why only include the two written forms of communication?

The traditional definition of literacy basically says that if a person can communicate through reading and writing, he/she is literate. If a person knows how to spell a lot of different words, but is unable to use that knowledge to communicate through writing, he/she is illiterate. This makes sense to me, but what doesn't make sense is that we traditionally only define literacy in terms of the two written forms of communication.

If literacy is a measure of a person’s ability to communicate with other people, then many different forms of communication should factor in which have not traditionally been thought of as factors of literacy. It seems to me that literacy is something more along the lines of the ability to understand various types of communication as well as the ability to articulate one’s thoughts through those forms of communication.

One thing I think of as a non-traditional form of literacy is something often described in terms of "social cues." I hear people described often as “socially awkward,” but I would be tempted to say that a better description of these people would be “socially illiterate.” People described as socially awkward are normally people who do not pick up on normal social cues and do not use those cues themselves. This, to me, is an issue of being illiterate within a certain subject area much as many people are scientifically illiterate.

With that being said, I'm now off to call the White House and let some people know that NCLB needs to be modified to include my revised definition of literacy :)

Modern Day Gospel

If Jesus had come to earth for the first time today, how would the rest of the world find out about it? Would it be the same as when he did come over 2000 years ago? I'm thinking not. When he came to live with humans the first time, people told each other in person (which would probably still happen) and some (very well educated people) wrote each other letters which were then sent by messenger (on foot or maybe horse) to the recipient. We know that some letters were written and some people wrote things about Jesus down just to keep a record of it, but in reality, this was not very useful to most of the world because most people couldn't read or write. Beyond the fact that this method of transmission for the gospel would be much more effective these days because people can read, I think the method of transmission would also be completely different. I can't really imagine many people meeting Jesus tomorrow and writing a letter or a book about it (at least not until they realized they might be able to make money off a book). So how would it actually happen today?

If you met Jesus today, wouldn't you text your friends and post on Facebook and Twitter about this Jesus dude you met today how interesting he was? You might want to let all your friends know about the cool guy you met today and how he is trying to change the world, but you would definitely not do it by writing a book. I mean really, if you had just watched him knock over the tables and shelves in the gift shop of your local mall-church, wouldn't you record it on your phone and post it to YouTube?

There would be bad grammar and incorrect science (because most people don't understand correct science) all over in it, but would that make the message less true? If you mentioned that the force of Jesus pushing on the table was greater than the force of the table pushing on him (incorrect) , would that mean that your message about who Jesus is and what he is trying to do can't be trusted? Sure the medium of communication matters and must be taken into account when reading and interpreting the information, but does it affect the truth of the message?