I made a decision last night to set aside my normally fluffy and fun reading and read some non-fiction. I felt like I needed a come-down from Planet Happy All the Time. So I picked one of the many unread books upon my bookshelf, and began it last night. It's called How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and as you can probably guess, it's not the fastest reading in the world. But so far, it's interesting enough, and I have to admit that I don't have very much prior knowledge about the intellectual history of Scotland. I still can't see how the stuff I'm reading equates to the Scots inventing the modern world, but it's compelling for other reasons.
For instance, in the Seventeenth Century, the Scots passed something called the School Act, which made it law that evey parish should have a school, with a teacher. By and far, this law was followed, the result of which was a literate society at a time when most European societies were literate only at the top levels of the society. According to the author, England didn't catch up to Scotland in terms of the male literacy rate until the 1880's. That's fairly compelling, if it's true, and it's something I never would have known if I hadn't picked this book up.
It's astonishing to think that literacy rates in the 90th percentile, across both genders, are relatively new developments. We're just so used to the idea that everyone can read, and that everyone does, in some measure, read. When I try to imagine being illiterate, I can't. I can't figure out how confusing the world would be if I couldn't read my own name, or the name of the street that I live on. If I couldn't follow a recipe, or read the instruction manual for any one of the myriad appliances and electronic devices that I own. How do you vote if you can't read? How do you hold a job if you can't read? How do you drive if you can't read?
I suspect that there are a lot of persons who are functionally illiterate. They can read their own name, and some of the most basic words, but ask them to read anything in depth, and with new words, and they cannot. I think it would be terrifying. I think it must be the most marginalizing feeling--the whole world is moving on a different level from the one you're moving on. I've also often thought that if I were any kind of a good person, I'd get literacy teacher training and start teaching people to read, simply because of how passionate about reading that I am. But I haven't sought that training, so I'm not sure what that says about me. Perhaps I will, at some point. (I do know that I make a horrible instructor for anything. I'm not patient in the least, and I recognize that as a limitation. It's not an excuse, however.) I like to think that by working in libraries, I'll at least be helping people become more information literate, which is another sort of literacy that comes after basic literacy.
All this from a book on Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Scotland.
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