Literacy is a word that for many has come to stand for competency or knowledge with one of possibly millions of topics, including math, computers or even smart phones. But literacy is also commonly used to specifically refer to a person’s ability to read and write. This use of the word literacy is what I would like to focus on. A question that I have always thought about is “How has literacy changed throughout human history?” Not exactly in that way because I am in fact not a complete literacy nerd, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about what the average person’s reading and writing abilities were in decades and centuries past. I have also spent an equal amount of time looking into the lives of old authors to gain some understanding of what types of live the “literate” held in different time periods of history.
I hope to present this topic as a vignette of each century, from the 1400s to now. I want to answer the questions of What were the literacy rates at that time? (of either the world or maybe the US after it becomes the US?) What was “literacy” for the common person? What was the life of a truly “literate” person like at that time? And finally I would like to highlight popular works and authors of the period to give a proper setting for the reader. I want to do this all in one report to properly encapsulate the major aspects of literacy, so people can have the proper perspective of where we used to be as a society, in order to understand how far we have come.
I am thinking of doing the prior in an order that is yet to be determined and may do “Biographies” of the common and literate people of the time to make the information more enjoyable and identifiable to readers.
A lot of my sources cover literacy rates of the past two or three centuries so finding numbers that go back to the 1400s may be challenging. Additionally, I haven’t looked at specific works or authors from any century but that should be the easy part of the research. Overall the following sources offer a good starting point to understand how literate we have become as a society, but don’t offer as much information on how illiterate we were (probably some correlation there.) Overall, online research sources will be my friend and numbers will ultimately be a large part of my final report.
Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2019) – “Literacy”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/literacy’ [Online Resource]
This first source may be one of the most extensive sources that I have found. I gives hard numbers and graphs for a whole host data sets including World Literacy Rates since 1800, literacy in specific countries in Latin America, education rates and other correlating factors that relate to literacy. Finally, this source is a great spring board for finding other sources. It has a few links to historical literacy estimates that go back to the 1400 and 1500s based on signed documents and book sales at those times and has a lot of great references on where the author sourced his information.
Overall, there is a lot of content from this source that I can dig through. It gives me options for different perspectives I can take on literacy and how/why it has evolved and what correlating factors might be related to an increase in literacy, or vice versa.
Paul Gee, J. (1988). The Legacies of Literacy: From Plato to Freire through Harvey Graff. Harvard Educational Review, 58(2), 195-213.
This is probably the densest essay of the bunch but one that may provide the most extensive insight into the history of literacy. This is actually more of a review of the vast array of Graff’s work and summarizes a lot of his points under the pretense of making a complete history of what literacy is and where/when it first truly started for the modern world as it is used today. It also mentions the impact and importance of literacy at different points in history and the greater effect of this literate culture.
I believe this essay will be a foundational piece to my project as it covers many of the aspects of what I am looking to have in my project. It is a little lacking in hard numbers but that deficit can easily be made up with many of the other sources I have gathered. This piece is a great source of expert opinion on what literacy was and has become for our society.
Wagner, D. A. (2011). What happened to literacy? Historical and conceptual perspectives on literacy in UNESCO. International Journal of Educational Development,31(3), 319-323. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2010.11.015
This article analyzes the impact of UNESCO’s nearly six decade dedication to be the international agency leader in literacy. The essay takes a look at how UNESCO has acted to help improve world literacy rates, and by how much these rates have improved. It goes on to mention that other aspects of educational development have received greater attention and resources by donors recently and analyzes how UNESCO’s literacy work will be affected by this increasing lack of resources.
This article will prove to be useful when analyzing more recent literacy data and how/why these rates have improved and what we can do in the future to further improve literacy rates. This source will be a good reference for more modern data and when speculating what world literacy will be like in the coming future.
Yurtoğlu, N. (2018). Excerpts are taken from Chapter 1 of 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait. History Studies International Journal of History,10(7), 241-264. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp.
This source looks at a couple of the key factors that relate to literacy from 1900 to present. In addition to historical literacy rates in the United States, this essay also provides data on the education of the general population, including enrollment rates and educational attainment rates for the population. While not a long source, it is filled with good information and numbers to reference.
This is a great resource to highlight what the average person at any point in the last 100 years life would be like, and how likely they were to be literate. This provides information to be compared to the world rates, and makes giving a “biography” of the average and literate person of this era easier.
Graff, H. (1987). The labyrinths of literacy : Reflections on literacy past and present. London ; New York: Falmer Press.
This piece looks at the history of literacy in North America and Europe and goes through arguments to disprove some misconceptions that many people may have when it comes to literacy. These misconceptions include the idea that industrialization depended on widespread literacy, how literacy has changed with our schooling, and also the correlation between literacy and higher earning, greater civility, citizen participation and higher forms of thought.
Overall, these essays will be great for tackling some of the fallacies that circulate around literacy, and will provide good information on what aspects of our lives and society as a whole are affected by literacy.
Kaestle, C. (1985). Chapter 1: The History of Literacy and the History of Readers. Review of Research in Education, 12(1), 11-53.
This book takes a look at the study of literacy itself. It highlights how the study of literacy is a relatively recent development and talks about some of the shortcomings ignoring it and its social impact throughout history. The book then goes on to talk about how literacy is being viewed in the modern age in both an academic and legislative context, including how improved literacy rates and communication could improve our society and country as a whole.
This book will provide some great context on the social aspects of literacy and how literacy and the improvement of a community and country can work together. Ultimately I think this will provide a great social look at literacy that many of the other sources haven’t touched on.
Mira d’Ercole, M., et al. (2014), How Was Life? : Global Well-being since 1820 (Summary), OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/7eeabaee-en.
This article mentions a wide array of statistics for the well-being of 25 major countries and how this has changed and developed since 1820. While the majority of this book/report/what-have-you focuses on the vastly deep standards by which we can measure a country and its citizens well-being, it does include information on literacy and education rates and is a good source for valid numbers on the topic. Overall this may be one of the lighter sources when it comes to content but it still provides valuable information and hard numbers that come from a valid source.
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