Thoughteracy for All

M.O. Thirunarayanan.
Ubiquity. 7(5) (February 7, 2006)

This is pretty wild. The idea underlying "thougheracy" is a return to oral language traditions augmented by computer and media driven learning. The claim is that written word learning has no advantages over oral language learning, so why do it? I'll just quote a few passages

Literacy is defined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as:

... the ability to read and write, with understanding, a short simple statement about one's everyday life.

The National Center for Educational Statistics defined literacy as follows, and used it in its 1992 and 2003 literacy assessments:

using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.

Such limited and primarily alphabet-based definitions of literacy may have been appropriate, and perhaps even sufficient, until the emergence of sophisticated tools of information and communications technologies, such as the computer, cell phone, video cameras, text scanners and text-to-speech converters, and voice recognition and language translation technologies. These new and versatile technologies will slowly but surely initially diminish and then eventually altogether do away with peoples' reliance on soon to be obsolete skills such as reading and writing.

Quoting Steven Pinker:

Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. ...

But evolution did not prepare us for reading. It is, in fact, an unexplained accident that most of us can learn to read. The skill is obviously parasitical on the reader's pre-existing linguistic and visual competence, but the specifics of grapheme-to-phoneme mapping (in alphabetic systems) requires the engagement of cortical structures that did not evolve for that purpose and that may vary from learner to learner.

Quoting Seymour Papert:

New media promise the opportunity to offer a smoother transition to what really deserved to be called "literacy." Literacy should not mean the ability to decode strings of alphabetic letters. Consider a child who uses a Knowledge Machine to acquire a broad understanding of poetry (spoken) history (perhaps relived in simulations) and art and science (through computer-based labs), and thus draws on this knowledge to conduct a well-informed, highly persuasive campaign to preserve the environment. All this could happen without being letterate. If it does, should we say that the child is illiterate?

Posted by Tom on February 07, 2006