The Meaning of Personal Literacy
By Dr. Synesio Lyra, Jr.
Thank God for the gifts of words, speech, writing, and the magnificent advances in publishing through the years. Many past civilizations had depended for many centuries on an oral tradition which kept their values and culture alive, thus transmitted from generation to generation.
Through the development and advancement of the science of linguistics, countless spoken languages have been reduced to writing, and even now that practice still goes on in many hidden corners of the globe, offering all the advantages which literacy brings to any individual or nation.
Learning to read and write has provided a significant boost to different peoples as persons become literate, more knowledgeable, and thus better capable of significant cultural advances, appearing for quite some time now.
Through the ages reading has stimulated thinking which, in turn, promoted more reading and more writing, and this pattern continues to influence an ever larger number of humans from childhood through senior maturity globally.
Those who have not limited their literacy only to school demands continue to advance and prosper in several aspects of their personal and societal life. Sadly, this is not as universal as it should and could be.
Several years ago, before I was to officiate at the wedding of a young couple, I spent several moments with the groom and his best-man talking about a variety of subjects. In the course of those interactions the best-man, who was a High School dropout, boasted of the fact that he was proud he had not read a single book in his life up to that point; in addition, he was never planning nor desirous to do so. He, along with several others, preferred a life of less achievement on account of those unwise limitations he set for himself without realizing it!
Nevertheless, such impoverishment is far more widespread than many realize. I have reflected on that several times, along with other glimpses into the climate of today’s society, and came to the conclusion that nowadays, illiteracy is no longer limited to the unschooled – those who never learned how to read and write; rather, it also includes those who can read but don’t and won’t!
