Literacy and Industrialization – The Dispossession of Speech

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the dispossession of speech in context of literacy and industrialization. Since 1965, literacy teaching has functionally served the cause of industrialization while simultaneously serving to justify the existence of two sectors in the Third World: one in which poverty has been modernized and the other in which poverty has been impoverished. The modernization of poverty and the impoverishment of poverty have occurred more or less in step with concentration and expansion of industrial production. Whether modernized or impoverished, poverty can be measured in terms of lack of capital and shortage of information. The ineffectiveness of teachers in extensive literacy programs is matched by the counterproductiveness of the literacy bureaucracies that have replaced them. The failure of mass literacy campaigns, coupled with the negative impact of voluntarist, narrowly selective literacy campaigns, means that the major political fact in the years to come is going to be the recognition of the significance of and the hopes placed in illiteracy seen as a cultural expression and a manifestation of a balanced interaction with the environment. Taken together with other still more significant indicators, the persistence of masses rendered illiterate does not alter the fact that the political initiative and imagination is gradually shifting in the direction of the Third World.