ABSTRACT
Across history and various cultures, literacy has seemed to many people something that makes people "higher" human being. The factor that caused social and cultural issues to be placed in the background in reading as a field was the fact that reading scholars focused almost primarily on reading as things learned and used in school. Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole studied a people named the Vai, a small West African group that had developed their own system of writing. With the work of Scribner and Cole, the anthropologist Brian Street launched a trenchant critique against sweeping claims for literacy. Eric Havelock and Walter Ong have been the two most influential scholars who have made strong claims for the general effects of literacy. Homeric Greek culture was an oral culture. Paulo Freire argues there is another side to literacy, the liberating side, an emancipatory literacy for religious, political, and cultural resistance to domination.
