As a strict – and, I’m told, strict and annoying – pedant, I believe basic literacy skills are vital. People who can’t read the directions on medicine bottles or car manuals leave school dangerously unprepared for their own safety and the safety of others.
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Literacy is also a sign of self-respect, such as not walking around with your fly open or food on your face. Consciously opposing standardized literacy can be creative, but literacy incompetence is also a hindrance to social mobility.
Agreed rules of literacy pave the way for communication. If you want to be understood, write something that the recipient doesn’t have to read three times. Clean writing has a productivity component. Any writing for work – from emails to reports to beautifully designed newspaper columns that sometimes need to be read three times (guilty!) – hurts productivity when they have to be corrected. Why make extra work for others? (Incidentally, this is an argument for texts created by a sufficiently advanced AI replicant, as long as it hasn’t stolen the language of the real creators, in which case they must be compensated for it.)
Most importantly, literacy has power in the real world. When Greta Thunberg said “blah blah blah” to world leaders at the Youth4Climate Summit, she spoke truth to power. Naomi Klein (not to be confused with Naomi Wolf) writes in her brilliant 2023 book Doppelgangerwrote that the polarized forces devouring world politics have in common “a fundamental war of words and meanings.”
Donald Trump’s blatant disregard for all words and meanings is an expression of this hostility to literacy, but so are Kamala Harris’ eloquent statements that she has no intention of doing anything about. Klein paraphrases Hannah Arendt on the rise of totalitarianism: “When nothing means something and nothing follows from something else, then anything is possible.” Words can be weapons, but words stripped of their meaning and mocking meaning itself lay the groundwork for the worst abuses imaginable. That is, or was, what the 20th century taught us about literacy.
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But what if the guardians of literacy are wrong or hopelessly out of date? What if artificial intelligence displaces literacy and numeracy? Lynne Truss writes in her 2004 bestseller Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuationwrote: “The reason for championing punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way to convey meaning.”
What if it was the equivalent of pleading for cufflinks and tie pins? Truss was starting from the tip of the iceberg. Today it’s about removing apostrophes from road signs (a lively debate in the UK in 2024), tomorrow it’s about replacing words entirely with emojis, and the day after that it’s about the end of civilisation. What if this is just scaremongering by the language destroyers?
I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s a reminder to question the assumptions we bring into a discussion.
What I do see, however, is that students’ thumbs are hopping across their phones more nimbly than an Olympic breakdancer, giving rise to a new kind of literacy that is rapidly overtaking the old. For the majority of students, school is the only place in their lives where they are required to observe ‘correct’ spelling, grammar and punctuation (and the only place where they are required to use more than basic maths). Their declining NAPLAN scores, for many, are not because they are ‘failing’ literacy and numeracy, but because they are openly rejecting a set of rules that is irrelevant to them. Where have their school libraries gone? Where are the teacher librarians? Irrelevant. Defunded.
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But if they jump out of the rain of normal literacy and numeracy, what fire are they jumping into? It’s a fire that has already caught most of them. Outside the classroom, they have already entered the self-reinforcing digital environment of algorithms that give them more of the content they previously demanded and of advertising that targets the data they unwittingly gave away. If they abandon literacy and numeracy, they will find a line of Zuckerbergs and Musks waiting for them with open arms.
Literacy scores are not critical in and of themselves, but they are important indicators of whether students are being prepared for adult life; whether they will think independently and escape the pull of commercial and political servitude. A functional education provides students with the opportunity to become free-thinking, conscious, curious, and compassionate participants in a community.
On the other hand, if the goal of our education system is to turn students into passive consumers and mindless followers, then it is doing better every year. The forces of conformity have got them where they want them. No wonder there is so little political commitment to funding education as our top priority.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.
