September is National Literacy Month, a time to consider the value of reading and writing inscribed in our society and culture.
Yet, in writing this, I’m caught in a hypocritical conundrum. To produce a commentary about illiteracy in a written format would be to risk participation in the same exclusionary practices as the past.
After all, literacy began as a secret code for the aristocratic and religious classes. The inky scrawl of the privileged meant nothing to the peasants who worked their land and probably paid for the elite’s paper.
Writing was, and to some extent still is, a privilege, a fact that I take for granted daily as a humanities student and literary aficionada. In the United States, we tend to assume that literacy is a universal skill, a legacy of our commitment to public education.
But exclusions still exist, one of which remains indelibly printed in my memory.
A couple of years ago, when reporting on a classmate of mine who had Down syndrome, my hometown newspaper commented that his Down syndrome prevented him from learning to read.
I don’t mean to attack minor details of phrasing. I’m sure you could nitpick my own wording in this column. However, such a claim perpetuates the false notion that those with developmental disabilities can never learn to read or write.
A misconception like this is particularly harmful because it sets forth a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a student “can’t” learn to read, no one teaches her, and thus she never learns to read — regardless of actual, rather than perceived, academic potential.
Students in under-resourced school districts also lag behind in literacy, which tends to disproportionately affect certain racial or ethnic groups because of continued segregation and inequity in districting.
We’re mostly past the stage of firsts, of recognizing the first published author with a developmental disability, of celebrating the first U.S. writer of color to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Now it’s time to focus on lasts. We need to ensure that universal access to literacy is truly universal and that every last person has the opportunity to learn to read and write.
Literacy is about communication, about sharing words and ideas. Literacy education should be the same way, a communal act of sharing and not an exclusionary practice dependent on the relative resources of a school district.
Banned Books Week also falls in late September, and the questions it raises over censorship point out lingering exclusions in writing and publication. Book banning privileges some “socially appropriate” works over others’ more “controversial” ideas.
However, illiteracy is its own form of censorship, and it goes in two directions. For those who cannot read, all books are banned books. For those who cannot write, the chance to write a book worth banning never arises.
In short, illiteracy is a mode of repressed free speech, a denial of the rights written into the Constitution with our literate Founding Fathers’ quills and ink.
Is tempting as it is to delete this entire column as a rebellious statement about illiteracy, I’m not going to act on that impulse. Not only do I need to turn in something printable, but also a blank page makes no statement whatsoever. And I think that’s kind of the point.
kmilvert@indiana.edu
