The Literacy Impact
Autor: Jon Dold | Publicado: 2012-05-03T04:32:00-07:00

This post is just a first shot at something that I hope to consider in much more detail in the future - what exactly is the effect of illiteracy or functional illiteracy on the Brazilian population (or, at least the population close to where I live)?

First, some explanation of what one encounters in my neck of the woods, the dry interior of Bahia state:

-Most people, but not including many older adults, can be said to be technically "literate".  They can write their names and can read simple sentences.
-Almost no one reads books as a source of amusement.  Reading is almost universally considered a horrifying task forced upon you by schools (unless its the bible, in which case it's by the church).  One never sees books in public spaces, and not too often in private ones either - almost no houses have a proud bookstand displaying their literature as I often see in the US.  No one considers books necessary for transportation - take a two-day bus trip and you'll be the only one that brought a book.
&nbsp;-Negative views of reading seem to approach superstition - reading after you eat can destroy your eyesight, for example.  So can reading on the bus.  Maybe there's a grain of truth to it, but certainly not in proportion to the concern it causes.
-No one, in the course of an argument or conversation, will ever refer to something they read to make their case.  The ultimate source of authoritative knowledge is personal experience.  Next is someone you personally know that said so.  Third is television (and within television, it's a tough call whether the news or the soap operas are more likely to form opinion on a burning question such as "do foreigners bathe or not?").
-To a certain extent, reading is something you do if there is something wrong with you.  In times of depression, if you don't reach for the bible, you probably read self-help books, the only type of literature that appears to be widely available.
-One makes written advertisements (like pamphlets) at his risk - even people that can read the information might find the effort too great to bother, and will chuck it in the street.  In my experience trying to advertise a free community movie theater, most people did not achieve an understanding of what the advertisement said without some coaching (and it probably contained a total of 20 words).

I started to think about all this while reading a new book called "The Information", that briefly delves into a study on illiteracy in Central Asia in the 1930s.  The researcher found that illiterate subjects could not or would not make "logical" arguments.  The author gives the example of the syllogismish question:

All bears in the North are white.
City X is in the North.
What color are the bears in City X?

The literate observer will say "White".  The illiterate respondent will say something like "I don't know.  I've never been there.  I've only seen black bears".

Now, this is quite a bit more extreme than anything I've seen here in Bahia, but it still seemed to get at a kernel of truth about why I find it so hard to relate to people here.  "The Information" goes on to argue that the very thought processes of literate and illiterate individuals are quite different, and formal logic and argumentation are basically impossible without literacy.

Typically when a foreigner feels a disconnect in the country he's in, he's likely to simply attribute it to "cultural differences."  But what if much of the culural difference he feels in a place like Bahia is in fact attributable to the difference in literacy levels?

I don't know how big the impact is - I'm certain it exists, but I don't know if it's a lot or a little.  But I'd consider the following observations as candidates for further exploration:
-Very few people in my experience, including college students, can grasp a complicated or nuanced argument, text-based or not.  It's a tough task for anyone, but I'd guess that in more literate countries, there is at least a significant portion of the population that can generally understand what follows logically from a fact and what doesn't.  I reckon that population to be very small where I live.*
-There is an astonishing inability to think creatively among most people.  When I teach English from a textbook to groups, a good part of the exercises must simply be thrown out, because no more than one in five students can answer a question like "describe your ideal house" or do role playing.  They sit silently hoping to avoid the question, or simply say "I don't know".  If you give numerous examples, you can probably get them to choose the best example.  But few students will come up with an original idea, and it's not because of language issues (I and others have observed creativity issues a thousand times).
-There is a penchant for believing in preposterous conspiracy theories that I think most literate people could discard after a moment's reflection.**

I hope I'm not coming down to hard on the people here.  It's worth noting that any population, including that of the US, struggles with the challenges of logic, creativity, etc.  And people everywhere love crazy conspiracy theories, and do not like to change their mind.

But even with that in mind, I still propose (as a hypothesis for further consideration, not as a fact) that low literacy rates play a major role in local culture and that, as a correlary, if and when serious functional literacy real takes hold in the region, the culture will undergo some significant changes.

I have a lot more to say (and many more qualification to make, such as "what if it's not literacy per se, but rather a cultural factor that promotes literacy and other related factors at the same time that really counts?  Say, and 'educational culture'?"), but more on this later after some research, se deus quiser.

*To give an example from a few days ago, an English student of mine (who is also a college student) had heard some information to the effect that many words related to capoeira come from African languages.  She translated this into the contention that all words related to capoeira, including the word "capoeira", come from African languages.  I had read a couple books about the subject and knew that the origins are pretty murky and disputed, so I tried to argue that, while its indisputable that many words used in capoeira (say "berimbau")are of African origin, that doesn't mean all are, and the word "capoeira" itself could be an African word, or a Brazilian word based on an African word, or purely a Brazilian word (the word "capoeira" also refers to a portable chicken cage, which may be related to its origins), but probably no one knows for sure.  But she appeared to take my qualification as a wholesale rejection of her idea and merely replied by repeating a few times what she'd already said: "All those capoeira words are African words".  The anecdote doesn't amount to much, but I feel it's fairly representative of what I find on the rare occassions where I leave "nice conversation mode" and move into "fact-parsing mode".
**An excellent example: a friend told me that he found out that the moon landing was a fraud.  How did he know?  Exhibit A: the astronaut had a shadow.  Exhibit B: the astronaut was stuck to the floor (that is, he was feeling the effect of gravity rather than floating in space).

Now, dear reader, see if 5 seconds is enough to conclude that this is absurd.  I'll wait.

As for A, you don't have to know much to see that, if you can see anything, there is light, and if there is light, there is a shadow.  If the astronaut wasn't shrouded in absolute darkness (which he wasn't - we can see him in the video), then we know that he must have had a shadow.  

For B, most of us learned in school that anything that has mass has gravity, and the moon certainly has a lot of mass.  So of course the astronaut is on the ground rather than floating.  If I recall correctly, the moon has 1/6 the gravity of earth.

But of course, my argument wasn't very convincing - he'd heard his ridiculous theory from a friend he admired, so logic wasn't likely to get in the way.  My friend ended the conversation with "He had a bunch of other proofs too, I just can't remember them now".