Miscellany

About Literacy

I don't remember learning to read. It seems to me that I always knew how to both read and write, that I must have been born with a book in one hand and a pen in the other.
My mother told me I had helped Mrs. Scott with the infants’ reading at school when I was only nine. I can remember playing 'teacher' with my little friends. I was always in charge and we always had a reading lesson.

I used to arrange all our books our home. First I sorted them by colour, then by size; next by author and finally, by subject. You could say I cottoned on to the Dewey Decimal Classification long before I learned what it was. Sorting books by subject meant putting like subjects together and keeping unlike subjects apart. This was a valuable first lesson in information management.
Not bad for six, eh?

I tell people how I fell in love with books and reading and words at an early age, and how, with me, it was never infatuation but always the real thing. That love has now survived for sixty years. Piccolo ... brouhaha ... cacophony .... globules ... a soft susurration of sound ... onomatopoeia ... junket ... fibrillation ...

Words like this are magic to me.

And sometimes a bit of a problem, too, simply because I've acquired most of my vocabulary from reading. Recently I was at Whakatane reading a prize-winning story to an invited audience. I suddenly realised as I was coming to the end that I couldn't pronounce 'cicatrice'.

Perhaps next time I should stick with ‘scar’.

Saying words aloud has never been the most important thing to me, though I do like to talk and to argue. For me, reading is and always will be a private activity. I like to read in secret, alone and enthralled – though I can and do read anywhere and everywhere. On the bus, in the loo, washing up, in the bath … Did you know if you get a book wet and the pages buckle you can press them flat with the iron set on cotton?

The world of books is a magical land where I can lose myself, and find myself. Where I can discover what makes other people tick, what they do and why they do it, what they know, and what they put faith in.

I believe that there are two main functions of literature: to confirm and explain the world we know; and to introduce us to different worlds – to other classes, other codes, other cultures; to other times and other places.

I found out that reading gave the person who was turning into ‘me’ all the confirmation she needed as a human being and doing. From books I found out that there is nothing I've done or experienced that hasn't been done and felt by someone else. Reading made 'difference' OK. Exciting, not fearful. Like Anna Raeburn I can say: “Difference isn't wrong, it is only different.”
I know that whatever colour our skin is, we all bleed red and we all weep the same salt tears. Therefore I have something in common with every other person I meet - whether he or she is Moslem, Hindu, Sikh or Christian; whether yellow, brown, black or red-haired with freckles.

I'm sure if I met a Martian we could find things to say to each other, though we might need to use our trans-Galactic language decoders to communicate.

The confidence I’ve gained from books and reading also means that, when I need to, I can say all those things that need saying. For example, I can give praise where praise is due. I can also correct someone who is wrong about me, or about a fact or assertion we’re disputing. I can share what I feel and know with others. I am sure about what I believe in and what I must refute.

Throughout my life reading has confirmed who I am. Without it, without words, I would be a different person. I would be less. That is why I have always wanted to share literacy with others, so that each becomes more. I don't think you are nothing if you cannot read. I do think you are going through life seriously disadvantaged.

To be able to communicate is one of the most important skills we’ve got. Just to be able to talk to each other, person to person, with open minds and listening ears. To reach some understanding, even if it's not quite a consensus; even if we can only agree to differ and to leave each other alone. To talk to each other reasonably and rationally, not with angry words and blows and guns. Not with ‘planes hurled through the sky as bombs.

'In the beginning was the word ... '

Spoken words, and written words: equally important. Words enlarge our thinking, increase our capability, and expand our horizons.

When I was at teacher training college there was a textbook on our reading list - Bernstein's 3-volume treatise on 'Class, Codes and Control'. Now that was heavy going. (I supplemented my student grant by selling summaries of it @ $5 each.) Four years after I left college I saw a much better precis in the local baby clinic: 'Mums, talk to your kids.' That was the essence of Bernstein’s theory distilled to four words on a poster.

Suddenly I understood that experts develop theories; that teachers and writers explain them, but that it is the so-called 'ordinary people’ who apply them. Intellectual and emotional literacy teaches us that experts are not distinct and special human beings to whom we must defer.

We are all experts - for example, about ourselves. You go to see a doctor because he’s an expert in illness and what medicines to prescribe. If he's the right sort of doctor, he'll be working with you, as a fellow expert, because you know and can explain how that illness is affecting you and which treatment works best for you.

All such communication is, essentially, is a balance between subject expertise (the doctor's kind) and personal expertise (your kind). Subject expertise is what professionals know, and it can be taught and learned. Personal expertise is the body of knowledge that each of us picks up through a lifetime of being and doing.

And words are the medium by which we develop such expertise and share it with others.

Words equate to literacy of page and print, and to literacy of mind and mouth, for we learn from the spoken word and not just from books and learning.

Consider for a moment what an extraordinary amount of knowledge a child acquires between birth and five years old, i.e. pre-school, pre-literacy. Speculate on how babies think before they have words to think with. What process is taking place as they respond and react, learn, and do?
Something must be in place in our brains and minds before we’re born. Something is being learned before we speak; and long before we read.

Babies learn faster and quicker from birth to three than they will ever do again. So if you ever find yourself thinking you're stupid and slow to learn, think again. Once you were a genius. With a little application you can be so again. When we need to learn something, we learn it.

What reading means is that we can learn it not only from the people who stand before us and answer our questions but also from anyone with anything to teach, anywhere in the world.

And now, with the World Wide Web, anytime, 24 hours a day.

Learning from the spoken word is not inferior learning, but it is learning that is limited. The ability to read - that which we call functional literacy - is basic to a wider kind of learning. When you can read, you can understand not only the people and things that make up your own home, city and country, but also begin to comprehend the wider world. You can begin to explore and explain what it is to be human, your social and cultural origins and environment. You can know and state who you are, what you need, and what you have to offer. You can begin to make that unique and individual person experienced as 'Self' understandable to family, to friends and to strangers.

Reading, writing, listening and learning - these are important abilities. They allow us to do the two things that best help us succeed within the world - to communicate, and to comprehend.

To communicate is take our common and unique understanding of the external world and of what is within us, and share it with others so that they can begin to know and understand who we are.

To comprehend is to embrace the 'Other' - all that is not Self. If we understand something, what we have done is internalise our comprehension of it. If we understand somebody, we can never be separate from them again.

This is the prime lesson I learned from reading, and I had to learn it in my writing, too. Words are messages and, on the page, where you don't have expression, tone of voice or body language to explain your messages most accurately, you have to rely on what Edward Thomas called 'the best words in the best order' to get your communication across to your reader.

That doesn't mean when you write something down that everybody in the world will be able to understand it. There will always be barriers. For instance, languages and cultures that we don't fully share - though we can learn about them from books. Different levels of understanding, different interests, the different priorities we give to things.

Now, in case you haven't twigged by now, I love to read. It’s my passion. I am a print-maniac who suffers withdrawal symptoms if not well supplied with words. I read That’s Life! with the same interest as I read The Listener.

If there's nothing else to read, I'll read the labels on the sauce-bottles or the instructions that came with my VCR.

Of course, such reading is functional literacy only. Though some of us are readers – and some born and others made – others have the temerity to prefer rugby or mah-jong. And that's OK as long as we understand that it is the inalienable right of every human person to be able to read with competence and confidence.

To read is to know, and the first duty of the mature individual is to be informed.

Without basic literacy, how can we run our lives effectively and efficiently? We can not.

Public libraries are the visible embodiment of this belief, and, contrary to popular belief, they were not, and are not, a genteel, middle-class outcome. It was during the Industrial Revolution in England that workers first began to understand that they’d be left behind if they couldn't read and therefore couldn’t learn and understand, and, most importantly, if they were unable to apply new technologies, new philosophies, and the new politics.

So first came the mechanics’ institutes and technical schools, and then the demand for public libraries - for access to books and to information. These were grass-roots movements, both radical and revolutionary. In Britain they had a public library act (1850) twenty years before the first state education act.

If I claim that reading made me what I am, then I must also say what I am.

I am a word-master. I write poetry and stories. I teach information and study skills, English language and literature, and creative writing. I love to teach and to explain. I am also a paid researcher. All this explains why I have been committed to literacy and to second-chance education all my life. It has been my pride and my privilege to teach women returners, the less able and students for whom English is their second language. In teaching them, I learn much myself, for communication is always a two-way exchange.

At any level, literacy is rewarding. Functional literacy – the kind we must fight to get and keep for all - is the basis of competent living. It is also the foundation of literature, of culture, and of human understanding.

And literacy isn’t only an essential skill – it’s fun. Once you’ve mastered the basics you can begin to play around with reading. Word games such as Scrabble; crosswords; jokes and puns. His parents read poetry and stories to my grandson George as I did to my children, and my parents did to me. George is a good reader himself, but he still likes to hear something that's a little bit beyond him, that stretches his understanding. And reading will do this. George and I have just embarked together upon Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket and the tales of Narnia.

George is lucky because all the grown-ups around him read newspapers and books and discuss what they read. This has made them able to express themselves clearly when they talk and when they write, and to share what they know through simple explanation. Most importantly, it means they can share with George the magic of words and reading.

For, once upon a time, reading was considered to be an esoteric art – and that is magic, you know - reserved only for kings and wizards, for the mighty and omnipotent. Though I’ve never lost my sense that reading is a kind of personal enchantment, I also strongly aver that reading is for everyone.

So I am glad to help the work of the World Development Movement and of Oxfam, both of whom are committed to literacy programs in the Third World. During my years as a librarian I was happy to donate books to the Ranfurly Library. This organisation for many years has sent unwanted texts from the developed world to other parts of the globe. Those books have been used to teach school children, nurses and doctors, teachers and social workers in India, Africa and South America. Many New Zealand church organisations and service clubs such as Altrusa, and Rotary now also do this work. One Altrusa project was working with Maketu School on pre-school literacy. Other schools have volunteers who simply read stories to the children – in the case of Tauranga Writers for Children, their own stories. Tommy Kapai Wilson takes The Cuzzies into primary schools as the basis of ‘teaching children to read’.

This is all good work, and necessary work. For literacy has been enshrined since its inception in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Reading and writing may not be as vital as the struggle for survival, to get food and shelter, but of itself it has value and it can help towards those goals. A human being who cannot read is a human being who is limited. He is limited in his powers of expression and limited in access to information. He is limited in his ability to ask, or if necessary, demand, all those other rights to which he is entitled. He is limited in the work he can do and the price he can put on that work.

When I began my training as a librarian I was taught that the three main purposes of a public library system were education, information and recreation. Education is still the main means by which we shape and define our lives with purpose. Information is the basis of everything we do (and I am proud to be the person who invented the saying, If knowledge is the power, then information is the key.) Recreation - leisure - is one of the biggest growth industries of the 21st century.

I now live in Tauranga, the fastest-growing city in New Zealand with an ever-expanding school-age population and a generous percentage of 'grey power' citizens. For these two categories, a well-stocked, friendly library is important for education, for information and for recreation. Tauranga’s Summer Reading programme, run by Friends of the Library, is a model of excellence.

With children, at home and In our schools, what is as important as literacy? Without it, other learning can not successfully take place. Fortunately, in the main, New Zealanders regard functional literacy as necessitous and not to be taken for granted, and consider libraries, generally speaking, to be a Good Thing.

This is right-minded thinking not only here in New Zealand but throughout the world. So, please, let’s develop reading both in ourselves and in others and especially in the younger generation. Every day let’s challenge ourselves and others with new words and new stories, new learning and new discoveries. Let’s generously share our knowledge and skills with others. After all, what you give away will always come back to you.

So you've always got it to give away again and again and again.

posted by Jenny Argante @ 9:33 PM