ABSTRACT
The title of this piece is an acknowledgment of the uncertainties surrounding the debate on what we mean by literacy, which will certainly continue in future years; it is also a reaffirmation of Williams's view that culture, in any contemporary meaning, 'marks the effort at total qualitative assessment, but what it indicates is a process not a conclusion' (Williams, 1958). I take literacy to be an aspect of culture, and a fundamentally important one, using 'culture' again in the sense that Sarland (1991) has expressed it: 'the making of meaning and value, the sharing of knowledge, opinion and prejudice, and the delineation of a shared emotional response to the world and its artefacts'. The process of meaning-making is part of what it is to be human; literacy is fundamental human meaning-making.
