RR3

Putting it to Rest
In completing Ethnographic Inquiries in Writing, I was a little disappointed, not in the quality of the material given, but rather what I felt was a lack of closure the book ended with; I realize that the book was about how different people’s perceptions of literacy, but this never came back to the original problem posed by in the book beginnings. Namely that “…illiteracy has been singled out as a root cause of poverty,” (John F. Szwed, The Ethnography of Literacy) while the book ended with what could be paraphrased into all social outlets and mass media count as literary material, it in no way addresses how that’s relevant to literacy as a cause of poverty.

Throughout my responses I have voiced my opinion on how literacy is effectively reading and writing, because we must have an understanding of what it is in order to solve the problem, but the entirety of this book was required to come to a similar conclusion. This book builds to a definition, and does not continue into is use, which cannot be because of length, as it is by no means an exhausting read. It is in fact this misallocation of resources which has my proverbial feathers ruffled. Had a menial or more philosophical problem been selected as the issue addressed by the first selection, which called for a need to define literacy to achieve some intangible goal such, as elevating us as society or any notion that can be pushed aside as insignificant or only relatively useful, would have been fine. But poverty is NOT intangible, it is very much so rooted in reality; one only has to do a Google image search to find this out. American problems are important, international levels of poverty show the effects of unchecked poverty. Szwed continues “The wealthy nations of the world are now encountering rather massive failures in reading and writing among students at all levels,” saying even further that “…despite universal schooling, a continuing percentage of these nations has difficulties with these skills.” Sylvia Scribner adds support within her opening comment, “…literacy is a problem of pressing national concern…” Deborah Brandt will add even more emphasis to the problem with, “The foundation of national wealth is really people-the human capital represented by their knowledge, skills, organizations, and motivations” In the middle of an economic rut, The Great Recession as it’s been dubbed, it is easy to recognize the importance of any resource, especially that of the human resource. An unemployment rate that has yet to show signs of a true recovery July’s 9.2% to 9.1% for August doesn’t bolster much enthusiasm as that is well within the margin of error. (September’s doesn’t come out until this Friday so I can’t use it for this paper before submission) With such bleak statistics, how is it exactly that online social outlets can contribute to literacy in a productive manner? While we may be flooded with tidbits of literacy through Facebook for instance, their quality is very low, and offers very little benefit, this all, comes down to the quality of literacy, as appearing in my theory of literacy (see post below, as again I seem to have more to express than space to put it in.)

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