Study: Marketplace important player in literacy

If you came of age in the 20th century, you were part of a profound change in the way that Americans learn to read and write, according to a literacy researcher at UW–Madison.

Deborah Brandt, a professor of English, is in the process of studying the ways that the American workplace is changing the meaning of literacy and the values associated with it. She is interviewing some 75 people who hold or have held writing-intensive jobs of all kinds.

“We’re talking about the kinds of writing they do, how they learned to do it, how it has changed — or not — over time and the effects of workplace writing on their lives and the lives of family members,” she says.

So far, Brandt has talked with about 30 people, and the preliminary indications are that mass writing is the second stage of mass literacy, coming a century or so after many groups in this country learned to read. In her previous book, the multiaward-winning “Literacy in American Lives” (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Brandt notes the growing economic importance of literacy, for both employers and employees. Literacy has shifted during the 20th century from a moral imperative to a commercial skill. This fall she is teaching a graduate course on literacy, which she says has been informed by her research.

Beginning at the close of the 19th century, those able to read and especially write found themselves in demand in the marketplace, due to the swift and decisive rise of a new industrial economy and its wholesale adoption of such communication technologies as the railroad, wireless, telephone, ticker tape and many more.

The story of Hank Lockett (not his real name) illustrates a number of the changes literacy has undergone, Brandt says. Born in 1923, Lockett watched his father practice the now-vanished skill of telegraphy, conveying train orders by hand, on the fly, from a railroad station to a train’s engineer.

“The telegraphers ran along the side of a moving train, which didn’t have time to do more than slow down so that the engineer could lean out of the open window at the front of the train and grab a hoop holding a message that the telegrapher held up on a stick with a hoop attached to hold the message.” Brandt says.

Nowadays, technology has made generating and collecting any kind of information instantaneous. The principles of literacy embedded in Lockett’s story remain to this very day, Brandt says. For example, the emphasis on computer literacy seen in disciplines across the country is the latest manifestation of marketplace communication. Brandt says that just as railroad personnel were admonished to keep up with new requirements for speed, schedules and the meeting of both, rapid and ongoing changes in business communications today insist that workers update their skill levels constantly to maintain position in the “knowledge economy.”

Indeed knowledge has become a critical factor in determining standard of living. Brandt says this is especially true regarding computer literacy.

“Over the last 20 years, the workplace has stimulated the use of computers and the skills associated with technology,” she says. “Many people take what they learn from and at the office into private and family life. Because access to computers and computer skills is stratified in the workplace, business is a big, although little recognized, contributor to disparities in literary achievement in this society.”

In direct contrast is the way reading has been learned and taught. Brandt says that the majority of readers who grew up in the 20th century learned to read in school, and not for profit motives, but because “good, moral people are able to read.”

In the 21st century, however, the emphasis has changed.

“While knowledge and literacy are not synonymous, literacy is a form of knowledge — and certainly of human capital — that is getting implicated in the emerging knowledge capitalism, and with far-ranging results. Simply put, literacy is changing from a public good into a private good, from an entitlement of citizenship to a rentable skill,” she says.