Are the electronic media exacerbati

Are the electronic media exacerbating illiteracy and making our children stupid? On the contrary,
says Colin McCabe, they have the potential to make us truly literate
The debate surrounding literacy is one of the most charged in education. On the one hand there is
an army of people convinced that traditional skills of reading and writing are declining. On the
other, a host of progressives protest that literacy is much more complicated than a simple technical
mastery of reading and writing. This second position is supported by most of the relevant
academic work over the past 20 years. These studies argue that literacy can only be understood in
its social and technical context. In Renaissance England, for example, many more people could
read than could write, and within reading there was a distinction between those who could read
print and those who could manage the more difficult task of reading manuscript. An
understanding of these earlier periods helps us understand today's 'crisis in literacy' debate.
There does seem to be evidence that there has been an overall decline in some aspects of reading
and writing - you only need to compare the tabloid newspapers of today with those of 50 years
ago to see a clear decrease in vocabulary and simplification of syntax. But the picture is not
uniform and doesn't readily demonstrate the simple distinction between literate and illiterate
which had been considered adequate since the middle of the 19th century.
While reading a certain amount of writing is as crucial as it has ever been in industrial societies, it
is doubtful whether a fully extended grasp of either is as necessary as it was 30 or 40 years ago.
While print retains much of its authority as a source of topical information, television has
increasingly usurped this role. The ability to write fluent letters has been undermined by the
telephone and research suggests that for many people the only use for writing, outside formal
education, is the compilation of shopping lists. The decision of some car manufacturers to issue
their instructions to mechanics as a video pack rather than as a handbook might be taken to spell
the end of any automatic link between industrialisation and literacy. On the other hand, it is also
the case that ever-increasing numbers of people make their living out of writing, which is better
rewarded than ever before. Schools are generally seen as institutions where the book rules - film,
television and recorded sound have almost no place; but it is not clear that this opposition is
appropriate. While you may not need to read and write to watch television, you certainly need to
be able to read and write in order to make programmes.
Those who work in the new media are anything but illiterate. The traditional oppositions between
old and new media are inadequate for understanding the world which a young child now
encounters. The computer has re-established a central place for the written word on the screen,
which used to be entirely devoted to the image. There is even anecdotal evidence that children are
mastering reading and writing in order to get on to the Internet. There is no reason why the new
and old media cannot be integrated in schools to provide the skills to become economically
productive and politically enfranchised.
Nevertheless, there is a crisis in literacy and it would be foolish to ignore it. To understand that
literacy may be declining because it is less central to some aspects of everyday life is not the same
as acquiescing in this state of affairs. The production of school work with the new technologies
could be a significant stimulus to literacy. How should these new technologies be introduced into
the schools? It isn't enough to call for computers, camcorders and edit suites in every classroom;
unless they are properly integrated into the educational culture, they will stand unused. Evidence
suggests that this is the fate of most information technology used in the classroom. Similarly,
although media studies are now part of the national curriculum, and more and more students are
now clamoring to take these courses, teachers remain uncertain about both methods and aims in
this area.
This is not the fault of the teachers. The entertainment and information industries must be drawn
into a debate with the educational institutions to determine how best to blend these new
technologies into the classroom.
Many people in our era are drawn to the pessimistic view that the new media are destroying old
skills and eroding critical judgment. It may be true that past generations were more literate but -
taking the pre-19th century meaning of the term - this was true of only a small section of the
population. The word literacy is a 19th-century coinage to describe the divorce of reading and
writing from a full knowledge of literature. The education reforms of the 19th century produced
reading and writing as skills separable from full participation in the cultural heritage.
The new media now point not only to a futuristic cyber-economy they also make our cultural past
available to the whole nation. Most children's access to these treasures is initially through
television. It is doubtful whether our literary heritage has ever been available to or sought out by
more than about 5 per cent of the population; it has certainly not been available to more than 10
per cent. But the new media joined to the old, through the public service tradition of British
broadcasting, now makes our literary tradition available to all.