Upon entering this class, I never put any thought into defining literacy. To me, it was a simple concept concerning whether a person could read or not. Pondering back on that notion, I feel as if I highly underestimated the complexity of defining literacy. One of the first pieces that altered my mindset on literacy was Sylvia Scribner’s Literacy as Three Metaphors. The opening paragraph encompasses my thought process on literacy as of now: “although literacy is a problem of pressing national concern, we have yet to discover or set its boundaries” (Scribner 6). Literacy appeared so concrete to me in the past, but now it comes off as highly ambiguous in my mind. Even though Scribner does her best to give her audience a possible grasp of some minimal parameters for a literacy definition, I feel as if her piece only made the definition of literacy more unattainable. Most of her argument comes off as refuting society’s previous attempts at determining an individuals literacy IQ by pointing out the flaws of standardized tests, pointing out what counts as being literature (I.E.: reading versus speaking) and much more. From reading her piece, my initial thoughts (at least before we read more on the topic for the class) is that one cannot measure someone’s literacy in standardized means. The concept is too vague to be measured in superficial means, at least for now.
Works Cited
Scribner, Sylvia. “Literacy in Three Metaphors.” American Journal of Education, vol. 93, no. 1, 1984, pp. 6–21. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1085087.
