Demographics and Literacy

By Devon

In John F. Szwed’s article The Ethnography of Literacy he wrote about how times change and so do people and their ideas of education. He also wrote about how literacy affects countries, the different ways individuals learn, how the education system’s role for students, and what is being considered as “literature” today. The first thing Szwed begins with is that everyone agrees that literacy is one part of an education that is needed to be successful. He also mentioned that third world countries push in learning literacy to become better developed and that because the United States’ level of individuals that are not literate is rising, that is why the poverty percentage is also rising.

What was also interesting was that now days less individuals are reading classic novels and are also writing less books and more people are reading things like tabloids, newspapers, captions on the television, and other things. These things often require the education of elementary age students. That is why people are becoming illiterate. Szwed also mentioned that the most common influence on people becoming literate besides the influence of schools were those of church and family life.

This then leads to some families blaming schools for not educating their children and schools blaming the parents for not helping the children learn. The author mentioned a case about black students being told that the words used in their poetry were misspelled and incorrect. The school did not take into account the language varieties the students may have. This also causes problems when the aspect of bilingual students comes into the picture. There are areas that are populated by bilingual students more than other areas, so this can also have an effect on literacy in schools.

While reading this I remembered learning about African American English (AAE) in my linguistic and anthropology classes; that people make the mistake by saying AAE is uneducated English. But I feel that some schools do not understand where some students come from (meaning lifestyle) and that many individuals cannot use the lack of support from school or family as an excuse to give up.