Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Like cleanliness or kindness to animals, literacy commands such entrenched respect in our culture that we seldom ask what we mean by it or why we value it. In this very readable book, Robert Pattison asks both questions, and comes up with provocative and sometimes startling answers. With presidential commissions issuing gloomy reports, back-to-basics movements flourishing, and educators suffering frustration on every level, his common-sense examination of the subject is worth consideration.

Pattison distinguishes between two different and sometimes conflicting definitions of literacy. To some, literacy means simply the ability to read and write, though even that definition must be qualified to be meaningful. In some parts of the world the test is to recognize and write one's own name, while in others it is to reach a certain level of skill or to handle the basic paperwork deemed necessary for survival in the culture. Pattison rejects this minimal definition in favor of a more complicated and useful one: "literacy is foremost consciousness of the problems posed by language, and secondarily skill in the technologies, such as rhetoric and writing, by which this consciousness is expressed." Using this definition, one can see that Homer was literate, though probably unlettered, that the griots and storytellers of oral cultures are highly literate, while many modern businessmen are not.

Pattison reviews the history of literacy and shoots down some commonly held beliefs. For instance, he shows that a highly literate population does not necessarily make a country great; Iceland, for centuries at or near the top in [End Page 43] percentage of literate citizens, is relatively unimportant economically or politically. Nor does the ability to read and write always produce a liberal or enlightened populace. Iran, with a reading and writing level extraordinarily high for the Middle East, has embraced a repressive fundamentalism, a move led by the educated in its cities. He shows that literacy is connected with power, but takes different forms in relation to different cultural conditions. The universal Roman language served by written orders and records to run an empire; medieval Latin available to a select few consolidated the hold of the Christian church; the printed word of Renaissance England extended mercantile ambitions; television today is an unprecedented political tool.

Concerning the present state of literacy in the United States, Pattison is reassuring. He points out that falling SAT scores reflect not a more stupid student population but a much larger and less select group taking these tests, as well as the bias of the SAT toward "testing those verbal skills possessed by the literate white upper middle classes of 1950." In the past thirty years, he contends, literacy has not so much declined as shifted, just as it did at various times in the past. A new emphasis on the spoken rather than the written word has been stimulated by electronic media. Pattison sees rock music, with its "primal appeal of lyric poetry," as "the first art form of the new literacy." This "vital literacy" is opposed by the insistence on an established, sanctioned usage which many of the young refuse to adopt, although they are intellectually quite capable of learning its niceties. This refusal baffles many educators and writers who equate the ability to handle correct formal English with Salvation, at least in an intellectual sense.

Pattison saves his greatest scorn for those "language critics who preach the doctrine of correct usage from their syndicated columns." Correct English does seem to have a moral quality to some of these writers. In a recent column, William Safire discussed the subtleties of pronouns as objects and subjects of prepositions and concluded, not entirely facetiously, "Take that not merely as a rule of grammar, but as a guide to living a rewarding and law-abiding life" (Ann Arbor News, July 8, 1983 ). Yet Pattison himself recognizes that positions of power and influence in this country go to those who have ability with language, to a...