Culture and Its Impact on Literacy

          Literacy to most people is learning how to read or write. However, there are many more perspectives of literacy then the simple definition of knowing how to read and write a language. Did you know that the early alphabet was used for accounting purposes? Back then, there were no written stories the only records were of business transactions so that people could be taxed. The only people who understood this system were the elite and tax collectors. The first tax collectors were not believed to be honest men because they always had an edge on everyone else since they were literate on how the alphabet and record system worked. In this example, knowing the tax system is considered being literate without writing or reading any prose or poetry. Because the tax collectors had an edge on most people by being literate, they were able to take advantage of people and no one would know it because they were illiterate.

          This same idea of using literacy to have an edge on people still takes place today in other countries like in China. Min-Zhan Lu is an English teacher at the University of Louisville who writes a lot about the importance of literacy. In her article, “From Silence to Words: Writing as a Struggle” Lu talks about her struggles between being forced by the government to only write in standard Chinese in school and forced by her parents to speak and write in English at home. She found this a challenge because she was more fluent in English then she was in Chinese. This made writing her essays much more time consuming because she would know the word to say in English but not know the word in Chinese. Although this article focuses on a less imperative oppression, it still shows that not all people can be literate because of the countries they live in. In other places, they just flat out lack the resources to become literate, but they are able to be literate in the jobs they do for their culture.

          Culture is important when considering literacy because in different cultures literacy takes a higher precedence then in other cultures. In the cultures most people consider literacy to take a lower precedence, these cultures maybe more literate in survival skills since they are constantly fighting for their life in the wild every day. In the end, more civilized cultures are thought of as being more literate, but a day may come where the tides will change and the civilized cultures may become the illiterate culture.

http://www.junkyardwisdom.com/2009/06/08/literacy-as-oppression/