ABSTRACT
Literacy is a central concern of formal schooling in virtually all cultures.1 In this country, for example, the first legislation providing for public schooling was the “Old Deluder” law: “It being the chief purposes of that old Deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of Scriptures,” all communities in Massachusetts were required to establish schools so that children could read the Bible (Spring, 1986, 3). The early grades were called “grammar” schools and taught the most basic literacies, the three R’s. We still think of basic education as reading, writing, and simple math. An educated person is said to be “well-read,” while an uneducated person is “illiterate,” meaning unable to read but implying uncouth, unsocialized, perhaps even dangerous. The literacy “crisis” of the 1980s publicized estimates that as many as a third of Americans were “functionally illiterate,” and they were blamed for the drop in American competitiveness (Kozol, 1985). The “literacy crisis” has passed, replaced by a “skills crisis” in which workers are said to lack a variety of higher-order skills to participate in high-productivity workplaces (SCANS, 1991). Still, a preoccupation with literacy as the foundation of other learning is evident.
