The New Illiteracy

Today's quote is from a prescient thinker of the last century, Alvin Toffler. Alvin Toffler is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution and technological singularity. Toffler is a former associate editor of Fortune magazine. - sourced from Wikipedia

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

– Alvin Toffler

At the time this was written in the 1970's the pace of change was much slower than it is today. Toffler, as a futurist, was able to forsee that as change increased so would the pace of learning. But the interesting point is not about learning, but rather the unlearning and relearning required to keep pace with technological change. Formal education is not well positioned to react to the disruptive change that is increasingly appearing. In fact the university system as we know it may well disappear in the next 50 years as it loses relevancy to self directed learners, unlearners and relearners. Another influential thinker, also writing in the 1970's, Ivan Illich, visited this theme in his book, Deschooling Society.

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Learning, unlearning and relearning are all best done outside of the constraints of the formal education system.

Your literacy in this age depends on your own self-directed learning.

DK

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The Wonder of Reading

It is a wonderful gift to be able to read. It is something that we take for granted. Two things I read recently made me pause for thought.

1. I was reading a book by Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf) about 18th century literature where he points out that the vast majority of the readers were in London and they were an elite. Illiteracy was rife, not only London, all across England. So literacy as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even today most of the world's population is illiterate.

2. I was also reading another book on writers sharing their experiences of reading. The writer in question mentioned the influences from his reading and I had not heard of even one of the writers he mentioned!! This did not worry me unduly, but it does show that even with avid readers the points of intersection can be minimal or in this case, non-existent.

So we don't have a lot of readers and we have a literature that is so large that we can read all of our lives and still not intersect with what others are reading.

I have great hope that online education and outreach to illiterate areas will decrease illiteracy over time, but the second point about the volume of works will only increase. Writers are readers and more readers means more writers and thus more books written.

Not profound but interesting observations to me.


DK

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