Literacy

• 1. The Word Around Them

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  Between 3500 BCE and 3000 BCE, in southern Mesopotamia, the ancient Sumerians invented writing. It began as a way to manage the new quantities of information created by trade and large scale production. People pressed markings into tokens to track agricultural goods, then moved that record-keeping onto clay tablets. From these humble accounting needs grew one of the most consequential abilities humans have ever possessed: the power to read and write.

  For most of history, that power belonged to almost no one. In some early societies, probably fewer than 1% of people were literate, the skill confined to a very small group near the seat of power. Today the global literacy rate among adults sits at 86.2% as of 2015. That is an enormous distance to travel, and the journey raises questions this documentary will follow. How did a tool for counting grain become a human right? Why do researchers now insist that reading cannot be separated from the society around it? And why, despite centuries of schooling, do millions of children attend school for years and still cannot read a single word?

• 2. More Than Reading And Writing

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  Researchers often divide the study of literacy into two periods, with 1950 as the dividing line. Before 1950, literacy meant alphabetical literacy, understanding the meanings of words. After 1950, the idea slowly widened to include the social and cultural aspects of reading and writing, along with functional literacy.

  The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy in the United States stretched the concept further by folding in quantitative literacy, or numeracy. It defined literacy as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential. It sorted adult literacy into three types: prose, like a newspaper article; documents, like a bus schedule; and quantitative skills, like the arithmetic in a product advertisement.

  In 2015, the United Nations Statistics Division defined youth literacy as the share of people aged 15-24 who can read and write a short simple statement about everyday life. The European Literacy Policy Network in 2016 added all media, print or electronic, including digital literacy. By 2018, UNESCO's definition spoke of the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute using printed and written materials across varying contexts.

  Some researchers go further still, defining literacy as particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing. In this view, reading is always reading something for some purpose, and writing is always writing something for someone for some purpose. Linguist James Paul Gee described the idea of reading or writing outside a specific context as simply incoherent. That insight reshaped how the next chapters understand the entire subject.

• 3. Five Births Of Script

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  Script is thought to have developed independently at least five times in human history: in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus civilization, lowland Mesoamerica, and China. Each invention carried its own purpose and its own ruling class. Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged between 3300 BCE and 3100 BCE, their iconography emphasizing power among royals and other elites. The Egyptian system was the first to carry phonetic values, symbols called phonograms.

  In lowland Mesoamerica, the Olmec and Zapotec civilizations first used writing in 900-400 BCE. They wrote with glyphs and a bar-and-dot numerical system tied to royal iconography and calendar systems. Far to the east, the earliest written notations in China date to the Shang dynasty in 1200 BCE, inscribed on bones that recorded sacrifices, tributes, and animals hunted, all activities of the elite.

  The Indus script remains a puzzle. It is largely pictorial and has not yet been deciphered, so no one knows whether it includes abstract signs. Scholars think the Harappa culture wrote from right to left and that the script is logographic, though disagreement continues over whether it is even a complete writing system.

  The long-held view that cuneiform reading belonged only to scribes has come under challenge. Assyriologists including Claus Wilcke and Dominique Charpin have argued that functional literacy was somewhat widespread by the Old Babylonian period. Even so, professional scribes became central to law, finances, accounting, government, medicine, divination, literature, and prayers. By the consolidation of the Chinese Empire under the Qin and Han dynasties around 200 BCE, written documents tracked citizen movements, recorded misdeeds, and policed a hierarchical bureaucracy through law.

• 4. The Alphabet's Disputed Cradle

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  Social anthropologist Jack Goody identified two competing interpretations of where the alphabet came from. Classical scholars such as historian Ignace Gelb credit the Ancient Greeks with the first alphabetic system around 750 BCE, using distinctive signs for both consonants and vowels. Goody contests this, arguing that the importance of Greek culture led to an over-emphasis on the addition of vowel signs to a consonantal set developed earlier in Western Asia.

  Many scholars argue the ancient Semitic-speaking peoples of northern Canaan invented the consonantal alphabet as early as 1500 BCE. English archeologist Flinders Petrie helped open this line of thinking when, in 1905, he came across Canaanite inscriptions in the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem. Ten years later, English Egyptologist Alan Gardiner reasoned that the letters held an alphabet along with references to the Canaanite goddess Asherah.

  Fresh evidence kept arriving. In 1948, William F. Albright deciphered the text using inscriptions from Ugarit, some of them mythological texts written in an early Canaanite dialect with a 30-letter cuneiform consonantal alphabet. Those Ugarit inscriptions had been discovered in 1929 by French archaeologist Claude F. A. Schaeffer. In 1953, three arrowheads turned up, each bearing identical Canaanite inscriptions from the 12th century BCE. Frank Moore Cross saw in them alphabetic signs from the transition between pictographic script and a linear alphabet.

  The Canaanite consonantal system seeded later writing across the Mediterranean. When the Israelites migrated to Canaan between 1200 and 1000 BCE, they adopted a variation of the Canaanite alphabet; Baruch ben Neriah, Jeremiah's scribe, used it for later scripts of the Old Testament. The Aramaic alphabet emerged in the same window. After the Persians rose in the 5th century BCE, Darius the Great standardized Aramaic into the Imperial Aramaic script, which spread east to influence the Brahmi script in India and helped lift literacy among merchant classes to perhaps 15-20% of the population.

• 5. Parchment And Paper

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  Anthony DiRenzo asserts that Roman society was a civilization based on the book and the register, where no one, free or slave, could afford to be illiterate. The written word surrounded daily life. Laws, calendars, regulations at shrines, and funeral epitaphs were engraved in stone or bronze, and the Republic amassed huge archives of reports on every aspect of public life. Even so, in pre-modern times it is unlikely that literacy reached more than about 30-40% of the population.

  The Desert Father Pachomius expected literacy from candidates seeking admission to his monasteries in the late fourth century. A candidate would be given twenty Psalms or two of the Apostles' epistles, and if he was illiterate he would be sent to someone appointed to teach him, compelled to read even if he did not want to. During the 4th and 5th centuries, the Church pushed for a better-educated clergy, with bishops expected to hold a classical education, the hallmark of a socially acceptable person in higher society.

  The collapse of the Western Roman Empire struck literacy a physical blow. When the empire fell, the import of papyrus to Europe ceased, and papyrus does not last in the wetter European climate. Parchment replaced it, expensive and accessible only to the church and the wealthy. Paper arrived in Europe via Spain in the 11th century and spread north slowly over four centuries, and by the 15th century it was widespread.

  Numbers from this era are slippery, often extrapolated from how many people could sign their name on official documents. Economic historian Robert Allen estimated English adult literacy at 6% in 1500, rising to 53% by 1800. In the late 1200s, Milan held 1,500 notaries, over 1% of the population. Thomas More claimed in 1533 that up to 60% of the population could read English, while in Edo-period Japan literacy in the three major cities reached an estimated 70% for men and 40% for women. Sweden took a different route, implementing programs in 1723 aimed at making the population fully literate.

• 6. Boz And The Butcher Boy

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  G H Lewes, writing about Dickens' novel Pickwick Papers, captured a moment when reading reached the street. He described seeing the butcher-boy, tray on his shoulder, reading the latest Pickwick with the greatest avidity, alongside the footman, the maidservant, and the chimney sweep. All classes, he wrote, read Boz. Public notices, broadsides, handbills, catchpennies, and printed songs were the usual street literature before newspapers became common.

  In the late 19th century, gas and electric lighting spread through private homes, replacing candlelight and oil lamps. This let people read after dark and increased the appeal of literacy. The Second Industrial Revolution brought technological improvements in paper production, while better roads and rail expanded the capacity to supply printed material to a growing mass market.

  Industry itself demanded readers. As British industry improved, it needed more engineers and skilled workers who could handle technical instructions and complex situations, and literacy was essential to be hired. A senior government official told Parliament in 1870 that upon the speedy provision of elementary education depended industrial prosperity, warning that uneducated labourers, however strong their sinews, would be overmatched in the competition of the world.

  Reading and writing did not always arrive together. In Spain, the total literacy rate held nearly constant at almost 25% between 1841 and 1860, but the nature of that literacy shifted. In 1841 most literate people could read but not write, while by 1860 most could do both. The skills of reading and writing, the record insists, are not the same.

• 7. Counting The Uncounted

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  UNESCO data shows the worldwide adult literacy rate climbing by an average of 5 percentage points every decade since 1950, from 55.7% in 1950 to 86.2% in 2015. Yet rapid population growth complicates the triumph. The actual number of illiterate adults rose from 700 million in 1950 to 878 million in 1990 before falling to 745 million by 2015, still higher than it was in 1950.

  Regional gaps remain stark. As of 2013, the adult literacy rate stood at 67.55% in South Asia and North Africa and 59.76% in Sub-Saharan Africa, while North America, Europe, West Asia, and Central Asia have nearly achieved full literacy. About two-thirds, 63%, of the world's illiterate adults are women, according to 2015 data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 52% of adult women and 68% of adult men are literate, the widest gender gap of any region.

  The consequences of female illiteracy reach far beyond the page. Martha Nussbaum argues that illiterate women are more vulnerable to becoming trapped in an abusive marriage, since illiteracy limits employment and weakens their position in household negotiations. A 2008 analysis in Bangladesh found that for every additional year a girl's marriage is delayed, her likelihood of literacy increases by 5.6%. In developing countries, children of literate mothers are 50% more likely to live past age 5 than children of illiterate mothers.

  Not every developed country shows the same gap. Data from the Programme for International Student Assessment has consistently shown boys underachieving in literacy across OECD member countries. In the UK in the 21st century, nearly one in ten young adult women have poor reading and writing skills, many trapped in poverty and hiding the gap out of social stigma.

• 8. The Mismeasure Of Reading

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  Starting in 1975, literacy was often gauged by a single yes-or-no question: the head of a household simply reported whether members could read and write. In 1988 some countries added self-reporting. The method is full of holes. A yes-or-no answer cannot capture the continuum of literacy, and in some cultures drawing a picture may count as writing one's name. Often one person reported on behalf of others, adding noise especially for women and children rarely treated as head of household.

  Many countries measure literacy by years of schooling instead, and that proxy fails badly. In Greece a person is considered literate after six years of primary education, while in Paraguay just two years suffices. But schooling does not guarantee reading. Literacy tests reveal that 90% of second-grade students in Malawi, 85.4% in rural India, 83% in Ghana, and 64% in Uganda cannot read a single word. In Nigeria, only about 1 in 10 women who completed Grade 6 can read a single sentence in their native language.

  The World Bank and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics responded with the Learning Poverty measure, the share of students unable to read and understand a simple story by age 10. In low- and middle-income countries, 53% of children are learning-poor, rising to as much as 80% in poor countries. At the current rate, roughly 43% of children will still be learning poorly by 2030, an early warning that Sustainable Development Goal 4 is in jeopardy.

  The debate over how to teach reading runs just as hot. Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene wrote in his 2009 book Reading in the Brain that cognitive psychology directly refutes any notion of teaching via a global or whole language method, calling whole-word reading a myth refuted by experiment. Against the autonomous models stands the social view, where reading and writing are rooted, as Brian Street argued, in conceptions of knowledge, identity, and being. A 2012 hypothesis even proposes that reading might be acquired naturally, like spoken language, if print is constantly available from an early age, a claim that would change current views of literacy and schooling if it holds.