Until quite recently, scholarly and popular conceptions of the value of

literacy have followed normative assumptions about the changes

wrought by its digusion. Furthermore, literacy has been intimately tied
to post-Enlightenment, “liberal” social theories and expectations of the
role of literacy and schooling in socioeconomic development, social
order, and individual progress. This set of conjectures constitutes what I
have come to call “the literacy myth.” Along with other tenets of a
worldview dominant in the West for the greatest part of the past two
centuries, the “literacy myth” no longer suffices as a satisfactory expla-
nation for the place of literacy in society, polity, culture, or economy (see
7, 24, 26, 27, 42,47, 48, 58).
Harvey J. GrafF teaches comparative social history in the History and Humanities
Programs at the University of Texas, Dallas. This essay derives from his general history of
literacy in progress, entitled The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in
Western Society and Culture, to be published by Academic Press. The author wishes to
acknowledge the assistance of the American Council of Learned Societies, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the Newbeny Library.

12
 The Legacies of Literacy

The past misconstrual of the meanings and contributions of literacy

are rooted in the ideological origins of Western society. Expectations
and assumptions of the primacy and priority of literacy and print for
society and individual, the necessity of “functional” skills for survival
(whatever they might be), or the mass condition of literacy as an index of
the condition of civilization-all have been guiding assumptions that
have obscured a deeper, more grounded understanding of the complex-
ities of literacy.
A more adequate conceptualization of literacy must consider three
things. First, a definition of literacy must be made explicit so that it can
then be used comparatively over time and across space. If, for example,
what is meant by literacy are the basic abilities to read and write, then
the evidence of changes in such measures as Scholastic Aptitude Tests,
undergraduate composition abilities, and Armed Forces Qualifying
Tests as appropriate representations of literacy become problematic.
The evidence of such measures should not be ignored but their applica-
tion to understanding literacy should be made cautiously, if at all.
In my view, basic or primary levels of reading and writing constitute
the only flexible and reasonable indications or signs that meet the
essential criterion of comparability: a number of historical and contem-
porary sources, while not wholly satisfactory in themselves, may be
employed (see Table 1).Included here are measures ranging from the
evidence of written documents, sources that reveal proportions of
signatures and marks, the evidence of self-reporting (surprisingly reli-
able, in fact), responses to surveys and questionnaires, test results, and
the like (see Table 1; see also 16,21,37,48 [introduction and appendix-
es], 57, 76, 100). Such basic but systematic and direct indications meet
the canons of accuracy, utility, and comparability.
Some may question the quality of such data, or argue that tests of
basic skills are too low a standard to employ. To account for such
objections is a second component of a definition of literacy. Literacy,
above all, is concerned with the human capability to use a set of
techniques for decoding and reproducing written or printed materials.
Writing and printing are separate, mechanical techniques. Neither
writing nor printing per se are “agents of change”; their impacts are
determined by the manner in which human beings exploit them.
Literacy is a learned skill, usually acquired in a way in which oral ability
or nonverbal, nonliterate communicative modes are not.’
Writings about the imputed “consequences,” “implications,” or
“
concomitants” of literacy have assigned to literacy’s acquisition a truly

For more on literacy as a learned skill, see (6,16,17,18,20,21,25,37,42,43,44,45,

46, 48, 49, 50, 76, 77, 79, 80, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 102, 103, 104).

13
Journal of Communication, Winter 1982

Tabre 1: Sources for the historical study of literacy in North America and Europe
Measure of Country of Years of
Source literacy Population availability availability Additional variables
Census Questions: Entire “adult” Canada, United Manuscripts: Age, sex, occupation, birth-
read and write, population States nineteenth century place, religion, marital
readhvrite (in theory): ages status, family size and
Signaturdmark variable, e.g., over structure, residence, eco-
(Canada 1051, 20 years, 15 years. nomic data
lad1 only) 10 years
Wills Signaturehark 2040 percent of adult Canada, United Canada, eighteenth Occupation, charity, family
males dying; 2-5 percent States, England, century on, US. size, residence, estate, sex
of adult females dying France, etc. 1660 on, others
from sixteenth-
seventeenth century
on
Deeds Signaturehark StX percent of living Canada, United Eighteenth century Occupation, residence, value
landowning adult states on ef land, type of sale
males;
1 percent or less of
females
Inventories Book ownership 25-60 percent of adult Canada, United Seventeenth-eighteenth Same as wills
males dying; States, England, Century on
3-10 percent of adult France, etc. (quantity varies by
females dying country and date)
Depositions Signaturelmark Uncertain: potentially Canada, United Seventeenth-eighteenth Potentially, age, occupation.
more selec? than States, England, century on (use and sex, birthplace, residence
wills, potentially wider Europe survival varies)
Women sometimes
included
Marriage records Signaturehark Nearly all I80 percent c ) England, France, From 1754 in Occupation, age, sex,
young men and North America England; 16.50 in parents‘ name and occupa-
women marrying France tion, residence (religiow
(in England) North America)
Catechetical Reading, mem- Unclear, but seems Sweden, Flnland After 1620 Occupation, age, tax status,
examination orization, com- very wide residence, parents’ name
records prehension, and status, family size,
writing migration, periodic improve-
examinations ment
Petitions Signaturelmark Uncertain, Canada, United Eighteenth century Occupation or status, sex,
potentially very States, E,ngland, on residence, political or social
elect, males only

Military Signatudmark
L most cases
Conscripts or
Europe

Europe, esp. Nineteenth century

views

Occupation, health, age,

recruit or question recruits (males only) France residence, education
WKOrdS on reading
and writing
Criminal Quest ions: All arrested Canada, United Nineteenth century Occupation, age, sex, re-
records read, read States, England ligion, birthplace, residence,
well, etc. marital status, moral
habits, criminal data
Business Signaturehark 1. All employees Canada, United Nineteenth, 1. Occupation, wages
records 2. Customers States, Engiand, twentieth century 2. Consumption level, resi-
Europe dence, credit
Library/ Books borrowed Members or Canada, United Late eighteenth- Names of volumes bor-
mechanics borrowers States, England early nineteenth rowed, society membership
institute century
records
Applications Signatudmark All applicants Canada, United Nineteenth- Occupation, residence,
(land. iob. States, England, twentieth centufy family, career history, etc.
pensions, etc.) Europe
Aggregate Questions or Varies greatly Canada, United Nineteenth- Any or all of the above
data sources- d i m tests States, England, twentieth Century
Europe
Censuses, educational surveys, statistical society reports, social surveys, government commissions, prison and jail records, etc.
Source: (46, Appendix A, pp. 325-327). This is a modified and grea* expanded version of Table A in (76).

daunting number of cognitive, affective, behavioral, and attitudinal

effects. These characteristics usually include attitudes ranging from
empathy, innovativeness, achievement-orientation, “cosmopoliteness,”
information- and media-awareness, national identification, technological
acceptance, rationality, and commitment to democracy, to opportunism,
linearity of thought and behavior, or urban residence. Literacy is
sometimes conceived of as a skill, but more often as symbolic or
representative of attitudes and mentalities. On other levels, literacy
“thresholds” are seen as requirements for economic development,
“take-offs,” “modernization,” political development and stability, stan-
dards of living, fertility control, and so on. But empirical investigations

14
 The Legacies of Literacy

of these purported consequences and correlations are infrequent. Fur-

ther, the results of macro-level , aggregative, or ecological studies are
usually much less impressive either statistically or substantively than
are the normative theories and assumptions.
Viewing literacy in the abstract as a foundation in skills that can be
developed, lost, or stagnated is meaningless without connection to the
possessors of those skills. Hence, understanding literacy requires a third
specification-its use in and application to precise, historically specific
material and cultural contexts. The major problem is that of reconstruct-
ing the contexts of reading and writing-how, when, where, why, and to
whom literacy was transmitted, the meanings that were assigned to it,
the uses to which it was put, the demands placed on literate abilities and
the degrees to which they were met, the changing extent of social
restrictedness in the distribution and diffusion of literacy, and the real
and symbolic differences that emanated from the social condition of
literacy among the population.

The meaning and contribution of literacy

cannot be presumed but rather must
be a distinct focus of research.

The context in which literacy is taught or acquired is one significant

area of research. The work of Cole and Scribner with the Vai people in
Liberia and elsewhere suggests that the environment in which students
acquire their literacy has a major impact on the cognitive consequences
of their possession of the skill and the uses to which it can be put.
Children who were formally educated in schools designed for that
purpose acquired a rather different set of skills as part of their training
than those who learned more informally. Whereas previous empirical
studies had confounded literacy with schooling, Scribner and Cole
attempted to distinguish the roles and contributions of the two. In
contrast with other researchers, they found that “the tendency of
schooled populations to generalize across a wide range of problems
occurred because schooling provides people with a great deal of practice
in treating individual learning problems as instances of general classes
of problems. Moreover, we did not assume that the skills promoted by
schooling would necessarily be applied in contexts unrelated to school
experience” (104, p. 453; see also 42,43,44, 102,103).These findings of
the restricted impacts of literacy have wide implications, especially
regarding the time and place in which literacy is acquired and transmit-
ted in circumstances outside the environment of the schoolroom and
formal institutional settings (see 57, 67, 68, 69, 105, 106, 116). Such
research must also limit the assumptions and expectations that students
carry to studies of literacy-such as presupposing literacy to be “liberat-
ing” or “revolutionary” in its consequences.
A second focus of research on literacy involves the tyranny of
conceptual dichotomies in its study and interpretation. Consider the

15
Journal of Communication, Winter 1982

common phrases: literate and illiterate, written and oral, print and script,
and so on. None of these polar opposites usefully describes actual
circumstances; all of them, in fact, preclude contextual understanding.
The oral-literate dichotomy is the best example. The proclaimed
decline in the pervasiveness and power of the “traditional” oral culture
dating from the advent of moveable type obscures the persisting power
of oral modes of communication. The work of Havelock on classical
Greek literacy (52,53, 54) or that of Clanchy on medieval English
literacy (16) richly illustrates the concurrent and complementary oral
and literate communicative processes. Clanchy reveals the struggle that
writing and written documents waged for their acceptance from the
eleventh through the thirteenth centuries-a time of rising lay literacy.
Early written documents, impelled by the state and the interests of
private property, faithfully reproduced the “words” of oral ceremonies
and the rituals that traditionally had accompanied formal agreements;
they were also adorned with the traditional badges of sealed bargains
(see 4, 14, 16, 22, 33, 34, 39, 41, 48, 53, 54, 73, 81). According to
Havelock, Western literacy, from its “invention” in the Greek alphabet
and first popular diffusion in the city-states of classical times, was
formed, shaped, and conditioned by the oral world that it penetrated.
Then literacy was highly restricted and a relatively unprestigious craft; it
carried relatively little of the association with wealth, power, status, and
knowledge that it would later acquire. Even with the encroachment of
literacy, the ancient world remained an oral world, whether on street
comers or in marketplaces, assemblies, theaters, villas, or intellectual
gatherings. The word as spoken was most common and most powerful.
This tradition continued from the classical era through the 1000 years of
the Middle Ages and may well be reinforced today by the impact of the
newer electronic media.
The oral and the literate thus complement and augment each other.
The poetic and dramatic word of the ancients was supplanted, though
not replaced, by a religion rooted in the Book, but propagated primarily
by oral preaching and teaching. Classical and other forms of education
long remained oral activities, with literacy by oral instruction. The
written and then printed word were spread to many semiliterates and
illiterates via oral processes; information, news, literature, and religion
were thereby spread far more widely than purely literate means could
have allowed. For many centuries, reading itself was an oral, often
collective activity, not the private, silent one we now consider it to be.

The history of literacy has been biased toward explaining

change, particularly as one of the key elements in the
development of the industrialized West.

Thus, it is not surprising that the history of literacy is also commonly

a truncated one, ignoring, as irrelevant or inaccessible, the first 2000
years of Western literacy before the advent of moveable type. This linear

16
 The Legacies of Literacy

perspective, with its emphasis on changes wrought by literacy, obscures

the continuities and contradictions in the historical role of literacy. The
role of tradition is a case in point. The use of elementary schooling and
learning one’s letters, for example, for political and civic functions such
as moral conduct, respect for social order, and participant citizenship,
was prominent in the Greek city-states during the fifth century before
Christ. This use of literacy is a classical legacy that was regularly
rediscovered by persons in the West during each age or reform move-
ment (for a summary of key points in the history of literacy, see Table 2).
Recognizing this continuity or legacy of literacy allows us to consider the
similarities and differences in rates of literacy; schooling configurations,
practical and symbolic uses of literacy, and the like that accompany
renewed recognition of the positive value of expanded popular literacy
within the differing social or economic contexts.
Similarly, the strength of the idea of the oral-literate dichotomy, as
discussed earlier, also was due in part to the exaggerated emphasis on
change and discontinuity. Finally, the primary users of literacy-the
state, the church, and commerce-have remained in effect, regardless of
the degree of social restrictiveness that regulated the supply curve of
popular diffusion of literacy. Although the balance among these institu-
tions has shifted, this triumvirate has retained its cultural and political
hegemony over the social functions of literacy. The development of

Table 2: Key points in the history of literacy in the West

ca. 3100 E.C. Invention of writing
3100-1500 E.C. Development of writing systems
650-550 E.C. ”Invention” of Greek alphabet
500-400 B.C. First school developments, Greek city-states,
tradition of literacy for civic purposes
200 B.C.-~OO A.D. Roman public schools
0-1 200 Origins and spread of Christianity
800-900 Carolingian language, writing, and bureaucratic developments
1200 and onward Commercial, urban “revolutions,” expanded administration
and other uses of literacy and especially writing, develop-
ment of lay education, rise of vernaculars, “practical” literacy,
Protestant heresies
1300 and onward Rediscovery of classical legacies
1450s Advent of printing, consolidation of states, Christian humanism
1500s Reformation, spread of printing, growth of vernacular litera-
tures, expanded schooling (mass literacy in radical Protestant
areas)
1600s Swedish literacy campaign
1700s Enlightenment and its consolidation of traditions, “liberal” leg-
acies
1800s School developments, institutionalization, mass literacy,
”mass” print media, education for social and economic de-
velopment: puMic and compulsory
1900s Nonprint, electronic media
late 1900s Crisis of literacy

17
Journal of Communication, Winter 1982

these three institutions and their uses of literacy illustrates the continu-
ities and contradictions of literacy itself.
The significant link between literacy and religion is perhaps the best
example. The sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Cath-
olic, are of course the most striking examples of this phenomenon. But
the religious impulse to use reading for the propagation of piety and faith
predates that time. Within the history of Western Christianity the
dialectic between the oral and the written has resulted in different
balances being struck in different periods, places, and sects. Literacy
served to record for time immemorial the Word, but its influence and
diffusion came, for centuries, overwhelmingly through oral means of
teaching and preaching.
The Reformation constituted the first great literacy campaign in the
history of the West, with its social legacies of individual literacy as a
powerful social and moral force. One of the great innovations of the
Reformation was the recognition that literacy, a potentially dangerous or
subversive skill, could be employed (if controlled) as a medium for
popular schooling and training on a truly unprecedented scale. The
reform was hardly an unambiguous success in its time, but it may well
have contributed more to the cause of popular literacy than to that of
piety and religious practice (see, e.g., 4, 15, 41, 48, 57, 72, 76, 83, 84,
108).
Literacy’s relationship with the processes of economic development
provides another striking example of the patterns of contradictions. In
general, commerce and its social and geographical organization stimulat-
ed rising levels of literacy from the twelfth century onwards in advanced
regions of the West (see 13, 15, 16, 43, 110). However, major steps
forward in trade, commerce, and even industry took place in some
periods and places with remarkably low levels of literacy; conversely,
higher levels of literacy have not been proved to be stimulants or
springboards for “modern” economic developments. More important to
economic development than high rates or “threshold levels” of literacy
(see, e.g., 1, 11, 12, 117, 118, 119) have been the educational levels and
power relations of key persons, rather than of the many. Major “take-
offs,” from the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages to eighteenth-
century proto-industrialization in rural areas and even factory industry in
towns and cities, owed relatively and perhaps surprisingly little to
popular literacy abilities or schooling. In fact, industrialization often
reduced opportunities for schooling and, consequently, rates of literacy
fell as it took its toll on the “human capital” on which it fed. In much of
Europe, and certainly in England-the paradigmatic case-industrial
development (the “first industrial revolution”) was neither built on the
shoulders of a literate society nor served to increase popular levels of
literacy, at least in the short run. In other places, typically later in time,
however, the fact of higher levels of popular education prior to the
advent of factory capitalism may well have made the process a different

18
 The Legacies of Literacy

one, with different needs and results. Literacy, by the nineteenth

century, became vital in the process of “training in being trained.” It
may also be the case that the “literacy” required for the technological
inventiveness and innovations that made the process possible was not a
literacy of the alphabetic sort at all, but rather a more visual, experimen-
tal one.2

The history of literacy shows clearly that

there is no one route to universal literacy.

In the history of the Western world, one may distinguish the roles of
private and public schooling in the attainment of high rates of popular
literacy, as well as the operation of informal and formal, voluntary and
compulsory education. High rates of literacy have followed from all of
these approaches in different cases and contexts. The developmental
consequences are equally varied.
Historical experiences thus furnish a guide to such crucial questions
as how and to what degree basic literacy contributes to the economic and
individual well-being of persons in different socioeconomic contexts,
and under what circumstances universal literacy can be achieved.
History provides a basis for evaluating and formulating social policy.
The costs and benefits of the alternative paths can be discerned too.
Thus, the connections and disconnections between literacy and com-
mercial development, a favorable relationship, and literacy and industri-
al development, often an unfavorable linkage at least in the short run of
decades and half-centuries, offer important case studies and analogs for
analysis. If nothing else, the data of the past strongly suggest that a
simple, linear, modernization model of literacy as a prerequisite for
development, and development as a stimulant to increased levels of
schooling, will not suffice.
The example of Sweden is perhaps the most important in this respect.
Near-universal levels of literacy were achieved rapidly and permanently
in Sweden in the wake of the Reformation (see 57, 58, 71). Under the
joint efforts of the Lutheran church and the state, reading literacy was
required for all persons under law, from the seventeenth century. Within
a century, remarkably high levels of literacy among the population
existed-without any concomitant development of formal schooling or
economic or cultural development that demanded functional or practical
employment of literacy, and in a manner that led to a literacy defined by
reading and not writing. Urbanization, commercialization, and industri-
alization had nothing to do with the process of making the Swedish
people perhaps the most literate in the West before the eighteenth

Among a large literature on these issues, see (8,9, 10,23,29,30,31,32, 35,36,48,

51, 59, 61, 62, 63, 66, 74, 75, 78, 94, 96, 97, 98, 101, 107, 109, 111, 112); for an opposing
view, see (1, 11, 12, 18,55, 117, 118). On inventiveness, see (28,56, 115).

19
Journal of Communication, Winter 1982

century. Contrary to the paths of literacy taken elsewhere, this cam-

paign, begun by King Charles XI, was sponsored by the state church. By
legal requirement and vigilant supervision that included regular person-
al examination by parish clergy, the church stood above a system rooted
in home education. The rationale of the literacy campaign, one of the
most successful in Western history before the last two decades, was
conservative; piety, civility, orderliness, and military preparedness were
the major goals (see 120).
The home and church education model fashioned by the Swedes not
only succeeded in training a literate population, but it also placed a
special priority on the literacy of women and mothers. This led to
Sweden’s anomalous achievement of female literacy rates as high or
higher than male rates, a very rare result in the Western transitions to
mass literacy. Sweden also marched to its impressive levels of reading
diffusion without writing; it was not until the mid-nineteenth century
and the erection of a state-supported public school system that writing,
in addition to reading, became a part of a popular literacy and a concern
of teachers in this Scandinavian land. The only other areas that so fully
and quickly achieved near-universal levels of literacy before the end of
the eighteenth century were places of intensely pious religion, usually
but not always Protestant: Scotland, New England, Huguenot French
centers, and places within Germany and Switzerland.

The rektion of literacy with social

development points up the highly variable
paths to societal change and maturity.

From the classical period, leaders of polities and churches, reformers

as well as conservers, have recognized the uses of literacy and schooling.
Often they have perceived unbridled, untempered literacy as potentially
dangerous, a threat to social order, political integration, economic
productivity, and patterns of authority. But, increasingly, they also
concluded that literacy, if provided in carefully controlled formal institu-
tions created expressly for the purposes of education and supervised
closely, could be a powerful and useful force in achieving a variety of
important ends. Precedents long predated the first systematic efforts to
put this conception of literacy into practice, in Rome, for example, and in
the visionary proposals of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Christian
humanists. With the Ealightenment and its heritage came the final
ideological underpinnings for the “modern” and “liberal” reforms of
popular schooling and institutional building that established the net-
work of educational-social-political-economic relationships central to
the dominant ideologies and their social theoretical expressions for the
past century and a half.
Although these crucial topics are not within my main focus here, the
significance of literacy to individuals and groups throughout history is
undoubted. There is already a large if uneven volume of studies with

20
 The Legacies of Literacy

this emphasis, highlighting the value of literacy to individual success,

the acquisition of opportunities and knowledge, and collective con-
sciousness and action. The writings of Robert K. Webb, Richard Altick,
Thomas Laqueur, and Michael Clanchy, among many others, make this
case with force and evidence. The role of class- and group-specific
demands for literacy’s skills, the impact of motivation, and the growing
perceptions of its values and benefits are among the major factors that
explain the historical contours of changing rates of popular literacy. Any
complete understanding and appreciation of literacy’s history must
incorporate the large, if sometimes exaggerated and decontextualized,
role of demand (in dialectical relationship to supply) and the very real
benefits that literacy may bring. Literacy’s limits must also be appreciat-
ed, but cannot be if they are not specifically discussed.
It is important to stress the integrating and hegemony-creating
functions of literacy provision through formal schooling. Especially with
the transition from pre-industrial social orders based in rank and defer-
ence to the class societies of commercial and then factory capitalism,
schooling became more and more a vital aspect of the maintenance of
social stability, particularly during periods of massive, but often poorly
understood, social and economic change. Many persons, most promi-
nently social and economic leaders and social reformers, grasped the
uses of schooling and the vehicle of literacy for the promotion of the
values, attitudes, and habits considered essential to the maintenance of
social order and the persistence of integration and c o h e ~ i o n . ~
Because of the nature of the evidence, virtually all historical studies
have concentrated on the measurement of the extent and distributions of
reading and writing; issues involving the level of the skills themselves
and the abilities to use those skills have not attracted a great deal of
attention. What research has been conducted, however, comes to the
common conclusion that qualitative abilities cannot be deduced simply
or directly from the quantitative levels of literacy’s diffusion. Studies of
early modern England, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sweden,
and urban areas in the nineteenth century all suggest that there is a
significant disparity between high levels of the possession of literacy
and the usefulness of those skills. In Sweden, for example, where
systematic evidence exists, a great many persons who had attained high
levels of oral reading skill did not have comparable abilities in compre-
hension of what they read. This means that the measurement of the
distribution of literacy in a population may in fact reveal relatively little
about the uses to which such skills could be put and the degree to which
different demands on personal literacy could be satisfied with the skills
commonly held. Second, it is also possible that with increasing rates of
popular literacy did not come ever-rising capabilities, or qualitative
abilities-or, for that matter, declining capabilities.

For more on this notion, see ( 2 , 3 , 5 , 19,20,37,40,48,49,57,60,64,65,70,71,

76,
82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 93, 99, 113, 114).

21
Journal of Communication, Winter 1982

Such evidence places the often-asserted contemporary decline of

literacy in a new and distinctive context, leading to a fresher and
historical perspective. Mass levels of ability to use literacy may have,
over the long term, typically lagged behind the near universality of
literacy rates. Perhaps we should pay more attention to longer term
trends than a decade or two and to changes in popular communicative
abilities and compositional effects among students, than to “competency
examinations” and SAT test scores (see 7, 21, 24, 26, 42, 47, 48, 58). In
the words of Galtung:
What would happen q t h e whole world became literate? Answer: not
so very much, for the world is by and large structured in such a way
that it is capable of absorbing the impact. But q t h e world consisted
of literate, autonomous, critical, constructive people, capable of
translating ideas into action, individually or collectively-the world
would change (38, p. 93).

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 The Legecies sf Literacy

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