Are we facing a new illiteracy?

Illiteracy means the inability to read and write. Rarity? But most of us won’t understand a word when spoken to in Tamil and won’t read a math formula that’s outside of the school curriculum.

And for some of us, any texts are like higher mathematics. “It’s hard for me to fill out official forms,” says 29-year-old Elena, an employee of a cleaning company, “I feel that I’m writing wrong, but I don’t understand how to write correctly.” “Functional illiteracy is the inability to comprehensively use the skills of reading, counting and writing,” gives the definition of psychiatrist Grigory Gorshunin, “the inability to integrate them into one’s social behavior, to benefit from the assimilation of new information.”

The degree of functional illiteracy is different, and not everyone is alarmed by it. “By graduation, I earned money to buy a car and drive it to school,” says Dmitry, 38, an entrepreneur. I saw no reason to study. Now I sometimes regret it. But whatever is needed, I just dictate to the secretary, and there are no problems.

Too many letters

“I honestly read the school curriculum, but since then I can’t hear about any fiction,” admits 32-year-old Victor. “I recently picked up a novel by a contemporary writer in a bookstore, looked it up, and immediately put it back on the shelf. “A lot of bukaf, niasilil,” as they say on the Internet. Is it possible to learn to read? It turns out that it is still possible! It’s not like riding a bike.

“Cognitive, that is, cognitive, skills are different from motor skills,” explains cognitive psychologist Maria Falikman. – It is enough to master a motor skill once, and it will last for a lifetime. But with playing the piano, this will no longer work, because it involves not only motor skills, but also cognitive skills. Purely cognitive skills are lost even faster.”

“After studying Pushkin’s work, I suggested that the ninth grade write a love letter and received answers like this: “Hello, let’s meet at 16.00 in the center of the Novokuznetskaya station,” lamented Irina Vasilkova, a literature teacher at the Pirogov School in Moscow. — Long sentences are incomprehensible to them and are not needed in the age of likes and emoticons. It is difficult for today’s children to even read a textbook; they cannot find the answer to the question in the paragraph given at home.

Risk areas

It is natural to assume that functional illiteracy threatens people from low-income families. 60% of adults in US correctional facilities read below the fourth grade. 43% of adults with minimum literacy live below the poverty line¹. But it’s not just the poor who are at risk.

“It is curious that the four sons of John Rockefeller, Jr. … became functionally illiterate because they were taught to read at the Lincoln Experimental School,” claimed writer and educator Samuel Blumenfeld.². “But they weren’t called functionally illiterate. They were called «dyslexics,» a fancy word for the same condition.»

Maria Falikman does not agree with this, in her opinion, dyslexia and functional illiteracy are different things: “Dyslexia is a neurological diagnosis. People with dyslexia have abnormalities in the functional organization of the brain.” And although for the observer the manifestations of dyslexia and functional illiteracy look the same, the second, unlike the first, is “cured” without therapy, through training.

To complex — from simple

“I decided to read a smart book so that they would stop thinking of me as a pretty fool,” says 23-year-old fashion model Zinaida. “But I noticed that I read the same page over and over again and still don’t understand anything!” In teaching, it is important to follow the principle “from simple to complex,” recalls Maria Falikman: “There is no point in immediately taking on large texts. It is better to start with small fragments, maybe even with sentences, then move on to stories and so, step by step, move to more complex levels. But in order to understand the meaning of the text, the ability to read and the ability to think about what is read is not enough; cultural literacy is also needed.

cultural background

People of the same culture have a common language. It’s not just about vocabulary and grammar, but about associations, codes, memes. “The words we speak, read, or write are the tip of the iceberg of communication,” says cultural scientist Eric Hirsch, creator of the theory of cultural literacy. To read well, you need to know a lot. If you know about ponds, about thrushes, wires and fruits, you have more reading ability than if you only know about thrushes.⁵. To understand what we read, we need to recognize information that is embedded in the text, but not presented literally. This is background knowledge: something that is “already understandable” and does not require clarification. So, we know who Pushkin is or that the legs of hobbits are covered with wool. But who Grant and Lee are, we may not know — this is part of American cultural literacy, but not Russian.

Background knowledge helps us learn, because learning is the correlation of the new with the already known. Therefore, those who know a lot learn new things faster and easier than those who know little.

Jokingly or seriously?

Misunderstandings are not always associated with illiteracy. “We almost broke up! And Maxim magazine is to blame for this! 35-year-old Nikolay complains. He read the recommendation in the article: when a girl gives a blowjob, hold her by the ears. And he did as his favorite magazine advised. The friend got very angry and threatened to leave. “I said that I had nothing to do with it, it was written there. And she kept saying: how can you not understand that this is a joke! — says Nikolai. “But how could I have guessed this, because there were no smileys there?!”

The fact is that Nikolai incorrectly built the context. “This is not illiteracy as such,” believes Maria Faliman, “but the problem of understanding context, irony and humor. There are big individual differences here. And even the same person at different times can be more or less inclined to accept humor.” The humorous effect is based on the fact that the meaning of the statement changes depending on the context. Discovering these meanings, we get intellectual pleasure.

But if we are unaware of the existence of additional reading possibilities, or, for example, are too tired to think about them, we read the message only at a literal level.

Not all errors are due to lack of information. Sometimes we get in the way of too much of it. It seems to many that star couples break up more often than ordinary people. But the statistics do not confirm this. Where does this impression come from? Because the divorce of stars is reported much more often than the family troubles of postmen.

The science of the 600th century considered a person to be a rational being, and explained errors by the influence of emotions (fear, affection, hatred …). Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has questioned this assumption. He investigated the errors of thinking and found that they are due to the very mechanism of thinking. For example, he proposed a task: 400 people fell ill with a dangerous disease. Is it worth it to buy medicine if 200 people still die? Most answer «no». But when the question is phrased differently: “the drug will save XNUMX people,” the answer is usually “yes,” although the situation has not changed.⁶. “Everyone falls into these traps, including formal logicians,” notes Maria Falikman.

Limited resources

In addition to this, our attention span is limited: if we are busy with something, we may not notice the obvious. Remember «The Invisible Gorilla»? In this experiment, viewers watched a video featuring basketball players in white and black jerseys and counted the number of passes made by the team in white. In the middle of the video, a man in a gorilla costume appeared in the frame for 9 seconds, crossed the site, pounded his chest and left. The video was seen by thousands of viewers, but half of them did not notice anything unusual and at first could not believe that they had missed the “gorilla”. So not only can we be blind to the obvious, but we are also unaware of our own blindness.

“Anything that takes up space in working memory reduces the ability to think,” says Daniel Kahneman. For this reason, the flow of information that we receive daily from the media and the Internet «reduces the activity of the brain, which is necessary for meaningful decision making,» says neurolinguist Tatyana Chernigovskaya. It can be assumed that one of the reasons for functional illiteracy is the information environment.

Clip Consciousness

In the 90s, they started talking about clip thinking, and sometimes even about “clip culture”, which will become part of the information picture of the future. It does not require imagination and reflection, but it requires constant reboot and renewal. “We are besieged and blinded by conflicting and irrelevant fragments of imagery that cut the ground from under the feet of our old ideas, bombard us with torn, meaningless “clips”, instant shots,” futurologist Alvin Toffler describes her (Alvin Toffler)⁸.

Tatyana Chernigovskaya assesses this trend as unambiguously negative: “If there is a new round in the development of mankind, then it is down. The world we live in is not the same as in all previous millennia. The number of those who find it difficult to write and read is in the millions! We need to read more serious books that make us human.”

Overload response

But what if clip consciousness is a defensive reaction of the body to information overload? “The inevitable reaction,” Grigory Gorshunin clarifies, “because we need to understand what the essence of the matter is in a situation of lack of time, effort, energy.” Since 1990, the volume of information has doubled every year⁹. In this situation, “those who work hard follow the news and professional literature, but rarely have time to read a novel,” the psychiatrist notes.

The situation is paradoxical: clip thinking helps us quickly extract information from a homogeneous stream, but this stream is visual, not textual, and those who have been in it since childhood lose the ability to think critically. “Parents complain about non-reading children,” notes Grigory Gorshunin, “but they themselves sit the child in front of the TV or give him a gadget to be able to relax. The main danger of new illiteracy is not that someone will prefer video to text, but that we will not have a strategy for selecting information, we will not be able to assess what we need.”

However, if you, dear reader, were able to read this text to the end, you have nothing to worry about: you are all right with functional literacy!

¹ Data from the US National Center for Educational Statistics.

² S. Blumenfeld «What Is Functional Illiteracy?», New American, 07.12. 2012.

³ Programm for International Student Assesment (pisa.oecd.org).

⁴ «Public Opinion 2008» (Yearbook of the Yuri Levada Analytical Center, 2008).

⁵ E. Hirsch, Jr., et al. «Cultural Literacy» (Boston, 2002)

⁶ D. Kahneman «Think slowly, decide quickly» (AST, 2013).

⁷ C. Johnson «The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption» (O’Reilly Media, 2012).

⁸ E. Toffler «Future Shock» (AST, 2002).

⁹ Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1999.