As a current computer science major, a former TV-radio production major, and a former political science major, my idea of literacy is admittedly about as clear and concise as an old man’s porch chair ramblings. Not only that, but even as writing this, every day it changed, as I either got better, worse, or simply different ideas about how literacy, in all frankness, is an undefinable term. Yes, I can sit around all day claiming that literacy is ‘the ability to understand and practice something through receiving and providing effective communication,’ but that, as the most abstract definition I can make, gives no help.
In computer science, literacy is the ability to make any program from any language, knowing the concepts of how computers and programming languages functionally work and differ, and how to read even the most hastily written programs. In TV & radio, literacy is the understanding of how to effectively write for a medium, as well as read, understand, and potentially adapt the articles & writings or criticisms & compliments of others into your work. For political science, literacy is the understanding of how (all, not only some) political systems fundamentally work, what the vocabulary and way of communication is for a given political system, and ultimately have enough of a grasp on statistics and math to realize why it is called a science. Ultimately, all of these definitions prove that literacy, more than anything, becomes another word for understanding.
In geography, in contrast, literacy is simply the ability to read, write, and speak a language. Languages aren’t just geography, so internally they have a completely different meaning of literacy. You can understand a language, know how to read and write it with your hands tied behind your back while blindfolded, and still be completely illiterate in all practicality. Literacy is the ability to cohesively comprehend the ideas presented in, and between the lines of, a text beyond simply understanding what every word, sentence, and paragraph means. Beyond anything, without full comprehension, there is not much more you can get from a language that you couldn’t get from replacing the words with pictures or replacing every word with a description of the word.
Last time a teacher asked me this question, back in a children’s literature course in high school, I realized this answer, and it became immediately aware to me that I, fundamentally, was illiterate. I could read and write, of course, and not at any bad level, I had read at a 12th grade level when I was in the 5th grade, and was taking AP Literature & Composition. What I couldn’t do was effectively read and communicate the more comprehensive ideas of text without being prompted to or without a lot of effort. I could repeat the plot word for word of Catcher in the Rye, and could say some of the more obvious themes and subtleties, but I would have to do a lot of extra work to actually come up with the full comprehension. I was only reading half of the book realistically and saying “Done! I read it ALL.” It’s like a chicken farmer who just decided he would check his coop every other day, not realizing that his chickens would have ate half the eggs by that point. I wasn’t intentionally being illiterate, just nobody ever told me I blatantly was.
From that day on, I decided that I would start reading attentively and thoughtfully. I have become a much slower reader in the process, however it allowed me to come back to classes and come up with ideas that even many teachers and respected peers would say “Wow, I never thought about it that way, but you’re right.” It improved my life so greatly that I then began to understand everything in many different contexts, the media i consumed, the direction my life was headed, and most importantly it gave me the ability to become a better and more effective person across the board by being able to decipher and reject many things in my life and in society that is treated as simply “the norm.” By living my life in a way that was no longer illiterate, I had become the person I could never believe myself to be, and achieve goals that I thought would never be achieved. Literacy, more than any other definition, is best defined as life-altering.
