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Reading and writing

By Marcel Côté

Jake Sully, the hero in the movie Avatar, keeps a diary, recording his experiences with the Na’vi, an indigenous tribe from the planet Pandora. Interestingly, his diary is in video form. In fact,there is no indication that the ex-marine can read or write.

Sully is a man of his time. According to ABC Life Literacy Canada, a not-for-profit organization that promotes literacy, 27% of Canadian adults struggle with simple written instructions and 15% are illiterate. Yet we rank among the best in the world on the literacy scale.

Everyone knows how to use a remote control because we live in an audiovisual era. The golden age of print last-ed only 150 years, 1850 to 2000. To-day, we communicate mostly verbally or through images. Watching TV and movies has replaced reading as a leisure activity, while phone calls and e-mails have replaced letters.

Nevertheless, in this electronic age, written expression remains important and is proving to be even more so than in the past. The Internet has become a vast library containing billions of texts.

Do we still need strong writing skills to succeed in life? Absolutely. However, the literacy level has always been lower than thought. The current level, 50% of adults with good reading skills and only 20% with strong writing skills, may be the highest ever recorded in Canada.

Parents believe they make fewer writing errors than their children and our great-grandparents probably thought the same. Does it matter? The Earth still turns, human knowledge still evolves and the economy continues to improve.

Written expression will always be important, as it’s a quick and enduring means of communication and is ideal for dealing with complex issues. Society’s leaders will always have strong reading and writing skills; in fact, literacy is closely linked to annual income.

This link, however, is becoming more tenuous. The dictionary, an essential work tool 10 years ago, is less suited to our needs now that the Internet can provide meanings and spelling of words with a click of the mouse. The printed encyclopedia is becoming an endangered species and newspapers are facing serious problems.

Knowing how to read and write is far from sufficient today. Youth need to learn how to navigate and search the Web, skills just as important as advanced composition. Moreover, there’s no longer any need to know how to extract a square root. A calculator can do it for us. From here on in, the ability to think in abstract terms trumps the ability to memorize a multiplication table.

Being able to communicate in writing will always be important, even though the importance of correct spelling will decline. In the Twitter era, everyone can get creative with spelling to mimic spoken language. For example, the number “4” (number “2” in French) has become a word. The trick is knowing the conventions, much like we need to know the rules of syntax. From now on, the ability to make ourselves understood will count, rather than the ability to apply the rules of writing our parents had to learn.

Each generation believes the succeeding one is less educated and less literate. What’s more, young people think they’re better and more informed than their parents and aren’t shy about telling them to move aside.

My father learned Greek and was proud of it. I learned Latin. Today young people make fun of my Latin and my father’s Greek. Yet they are undoubtedly learning things that will become useless over time and they will face the same problem with their children.

Illiteracy is a major handicap in society and one that must be dealt with. We have to encourage young people to read and write and especially to think, to give free rein to their imagination. That’s how they will be able to develop the skills they’ll need to get by in today’s electronic age.

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