История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 51 стр.

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fundamental tenet of Protestantism, and the private study and verification of

written texts was important to science. Both of these functions were enormously

facilitated by the development of printing and by the translation of important books

from scholarly Latin into vernacular languages. With the increase in the uses of

writing and the spread of printing there were more texts to read. Concurrently,

European society as a whole became more literate in two ways: more individuals

learned to read and write their native tongues, and even those who could not

themselves read and write came to rely upon written documents as loci of authority

and significance. In the 18th and 19th centuries in western Europe and in America,

even before the establishment of compulsory schooling, more than half of the

population had some competence in reading and writing. Compulsory schooling

had, by the end of the 19th century, made some level of literacy more or less

universal.

Partly because of the close tie between schooling and literacy, literacy levels

are often defined exclusively in terms of the number of years that a person has

attended school. Educational institutions usually differentiate a basic, or functional,

level of literacy, roughly equivalent to six years of schooling, from a high level of

literacy, a level of competence roughly equivalent to 10 to 12 years of schooling.

Such categorical distinctions have been criticized because they are insensitive to

the diversity of particular uses of literacy even in a literate society and the

irrelevance of the school to many of them. Many people incapable of or

uninterested in reading continuous texts pertaining to science and literature

nonetheless read menus, catalogs, letters, labels, warnings, invoices, and a range of

other materials of relevance and interest to them.

Moreover, literacy levels are judged against a sliding scale. The more literate

the society becomes, the higher a standard of literacy is judged as functional. In

Sweden in the 17th century a person was judged as literate, and allowed to marry,

if he could read bits of the catechism and sign the church registry. In the United

States at the time of World War II, when soldiers were screened for military

service the army defined a minimal level of literacy as that normally achieved in