История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 49 стр.

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UNIT 7

LITERACY AND SCHOOLING

Whereas oral language is learned quite independently of whether it is taught

or not, literacy is largely dependent upon teaching. While some local scripts are

taught relatively informally by parents or someone who knows the script well,

widespread or universal literacy is dependent upon schooling. Indeed, in many

societies schooling and literacy have been almost synonymous. Schools in such

diverse places as Sumer and China developed concurrently with the development

of a full writing system and were concerned primarily with teaching first adults and

later children to read and write. And it is inconceivable that modern, technological

societies could survive without schools to develop high levels of literacy.

Although schooling is critical to the development of literacy, it is not, by

itself, sufficient. Historians have shown that the level of literacy produced by

schools of any society is directly tied to the functions and levels of literacy in the

society as a whole. Consequently, it is unrealistic to expect that a modern, literate

society could be created simply through establishing schools and teaching children

to read. Schools tend to reflect society rather than to change it dramatically.

When compulsory schooling was introduced in Britain, Europe, and

America in the 19th century, it was nurtured by an environment of “lay” literacy in

which as much as 75 percent of the population could use written materials for

informal purposes such as keeping diaries, reading and writing notes and letters,

and personal record keeping. Such a climate of widespread practical literacy is

important to the effectiveness of schooling. The relation between literate practices

in the home and the level of literacy achieved by children in school has been

documented.

It is common to think of literacy as the simple ability to read and write. In

part such thinking is the consequence of the naive assumption that alphabetic

literacy is a matter of simply decoding graphs into sounds and vice versa. In fact,