Literacy: A Core Competence for Cooperation

Literacy captures a shared standard of competence.  The three Rs of former school days were reading, writing and arithmetic.  These skills were seen as core to moving forward with life, as a grounding upon which to build.  The workplace was stratified according to the mastery of these areas; and those with none were most likely consigned to low pay and poor prospects.  I was most certainly exposed to a form of rhetoric warning of this during the 1970s and 1980s.

What my own teachers failed to tell me was that literacy is about cooperation.  By imposing a standard of communication, through reading and writing, and also of numeracy we could do business with diverse individuals in diverse settings.  It is more than just three Rs.  Regional accents to one side, dialects and idiomatic form would, almost by design, impose a separation from the many.  Whereas the ability to flexibly articulate ideas, with a common vocabulary would enable people to share and to collectively improve ideas, and thus society and lived lives.  It would also facilitate mutualism in thinking.  Following Robert Hinde, communication is often a negotiation where both actors are trying to ascertain what they think by signalling to the other.  This is very different from a view of communication as mere information transfer in order to change the behaviour of another.  Instead, we can use language to think in public, together.  Literacy is thus a commitment to stepping back from emotional response, and toward offline, reflective perspective taking.

The commitment of literacy is a cost.  That cost is largely paid in formal education, but not entirely as we improve our skills through exposure and error.  Formal education costs time and money.  Even a free education, paid for through taxation, confers some financial costs as it will encourage further engagement outside the formal curriculum.  Moreover, for some, time spent at school is not time spent working.  Any attempt to avoid those costs will inevitably impact on the cooperative efficacy of those individuals; and depending on the size of the sample will impact upon the efficacy of the population.  But the responsibility does not rest solely with pupils and students, but also with educators and educational policy makers who impose those costs and establish more or less useful payoffs.  These are the people who need to think clearly about what literacy should consist of.  It is likely that we now need more than three Rs in the modern world.  A good case can be made for basic scientific and statistical literacy, as these are the bedrock of everything that is happening in the 21^st century.  If you want to listen to the scientists on climate change then you need to understand their lay summaries of statistical models and experimental work.  There are nuances around how to interpret everyday terms such as risk and uncertainty that might be easily lost, or worse, misinterpreted.  Even if we expect our leaders to be literate enough to deal with this kind of information on our behalf, it is doubtful that an undergraduate education in PPE will provide the requisite competencies.

The term ‘risk’ is a term that can convey a certain emotional valence.  A quotidian declaration that something is risky can imply a negative view.  In more scientific usage it implies a known probability of occurrence, which can be used to model optimal responses.  Removing the literacy removes the offline, reflective perspective taking and leaves interlocutors and speakers alike with emotion.  In this example, risk is seen only as negative, as something to be avoided.  It is here, and in like cases, that rhetoric and sophistry can thrive; rendering communication mere signal transfer and manipulation.  That is not to say all emotional communication is like this, and nor is it to claim that people cannot recognize attempts to manipulate them.  But what it is to say is that low levels of literacy within a population damage cooperation and impact negatively upon the political ecology of that population.  To reach balanced judgement we need the skills of literacy, as this allows us to discuss and debate.

When we see increased levels of rhetoric and sophistry, we are seeing a loss of literacy either by accident or design.  The outcome is less cooperation and a shift to factionalism and emotive, populist persuasion by emotional force.  Without literacy we are fearful, because we become ignorant.  Without literacy we will fail as a society.