The Ethnography of Literacy - John F. Szwed

• Everyone seems to agree that literacy is a necessity in the modern world.
• Associated with earning a living, achieving goals, etc.
• Particularly in the US, illiteracy is a cause for poverty.
• Shifts in reading habits around the world
• US: the reading & publishing of novels is declining, reading of poetry and plays is at almost zero level, non-fiction is increasing
• What are reading and writing for?
• How is language used by people?
• Goal of education is to produce a society who are equally competent in reading and writing.
• No society has yet to do this.
• *even those who are educated have different literacies. The CEO of a company probably doesn't have the same set of literacy skills as a doctor does.
• Schools don't take into account what students read outside the classroom
• Ex: someone who might not be able to read assigned texts could be reading baseball record books at home & have a lot of skill in that area.
• *sometimes it's hard to read assigned texts - they could be boring or confusing and if people don't have the motivation to do that, they might be seen as illiterate just because teachers don't see what students are doing at home.
• No set definition of what "literature" is. 
• Public literacy vs. private literacy
• If a school assumes a child reads at home, even though the child may not, the child will be at a disadvantage compared to other kids who do read at home.
• Ability to read a sign is a different set of skills - ex: stop signs all look the same, so if you don't know how to read, but someone tells you a red octagon means stop, you'll know that every time you see one you need to stop. 
• Literacy varies in socioeconomic classes, age groups, ethnic groups, etc.
• We have inherited the idea that "mass" everything is good (mass-education, mass-literacy, etc.)
• *our society has such a need to categorize things, so we just categorize people into groups, when it's so much more than that. Sometimes things don't fit into neat categories.