Why is literacy difficult? [closed]

Question

This question continues from Literacy in the classical world

It seems that literacy rates for populations prior to mass education becoming prevalent were estimated to be 20% or lower. However, it can clearly be observed (when learning new languages) that literacy (as defined as being able to read and write in a given language's script) is often far easier than fluency.

For example, the Hangeul script was derided by Chinese-educated Korean scholars as being trivially easy to learn, being designed for ease of study. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Other_names It was given names such as "script you can learn in a day" . Despite this, censuses taken during and after the Japanese colonialisation era showed that prior to aggressive governmental efforts to push literacy by implementing mass education, literacy rates were extremely low. http://fightforjustice.info/?page_id=3174&lang=en

The percentage of South Koreans unable to read decreased sharply from 77.8% in 1945 to 41.3% in 1948, down to and 13.9% in 1954.

Similar arguments can probably be made for European alphabet-based scripts such as Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, which were not significantly harder to read and write than Hangeul (which was only easy to achieve literacy compared to Chinese)

Since we can assume that people living in communities would need to be fluent in a common spoken language to communicate with each other, the fluency rate would then be very high. Why then, was literacy so low prior to the advent of mass education, when literacy was clearly highly beneficial? Were there any artificial barriers to entry that caused this low literacy rate?

Answer 1

Subsistence farmers don’t need to read a calendar to go about their business. The knowledge they need can be passed down very effectively in oral form. If they practice shifting cultivation, as is still done in many parts of the world, they don’t actually own the land they farm, so inheritance in our terms isn’t an issue.

What’s more, usually the “common spoken language” of such communities differs significantly from that which is represented in writing. In effect, learning to write means learning a new dialect/language, which requires people who speak that language to come to the community/village and set up a school. For widespread literacy, a whole infrastructure of schools manned by people who speak the central language is needed. Such projects must be carried out by states. Historians who have studied this (cf. “Peasants into Frenchmen” by Eugen Weber) argue that in bringing about widespread literacy, states in effect create “nations.” Actually, states can interact well enough with their subjects in the villages without widespread literacy. It helps to have someone literate who can read decrees to the peasants, demand their produce or labor etc. But that role can be filled by some intermediate class, effectively a tiny percentage of the population. Having too many literate people actually makes the system more difficult to manage.

Answer 2

You have to balance the difficulty of learning the writing system against the benefits to an individual for them to do so.

On the difficulty side, one easy thing to look at is the number of glyphs that have to be memorized. The first writing systems were pictographic and logographic. In essence, nearly every word had its own glyph. To give you an idea of what that entails, the OED estimates that there are about 180,000 words in common use in their dictionary, and perhaps a quarter of a million more they don't cover. Memorizing the meaning of that many glyphs is a huge challenge. Much of East Asia (iow: a large percentage of humanity) still uses a writing system like this today. For these people, literacy is tougher.

Alphabets on the other extreme only try to use one glyph per phoneme in the language. That restricts them to their language, but it lessens the number of glyphs to memorize down to a more manageable 20-30.

The other side of the equation is benefit. Simply, what does a person gain by being literate to offset the effort it takes? In a world where all written works have to be hand-copied by a human being, books were a luxury available only to the wealthy. If you didn't have a lot of money, or couldn't find employment as a professional scribe for those same wealthy people, there would be no real use for being able to read (and your access to written materials to practice with would be limited as well).

What changed the equation was the printing press. This dropped the price of copying enough that the common man could have access to written materials. The first practical working one started operating in Europe in the mid-1400's. The Renaissance quickly followed.