Literacy, Power, And Democracy In Mozambique

The Governance Of Learning From Colonization To The Present

Judith Marshall

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429714832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the relations between literacy and "people's power" in the context of Mozambique's project of socialist construction. It probes the tensions between literacy as a tool for grassroots democracy versus literacy as a tool for mobilizing at the base for top-down initiatives.

1
Literacy: People’s Power/Assimilation of a Social Order

When we consider the first use to which writing was put, it would seem quite clear that it was first and foremost connected with power; it was used for inventories, catalogues, censuses and instructions; in all instances, whether the aim was to keep a check on material possessions or human beings, it was the evidence of the power exercised by some men over other men and over worldly possessions.

(Conversations with Lévi-Strauss Quoted in Carbonnier 1969)

Houses are houses and the more of them the better; but education is never just “education” — it is the assimilation of a social order.

(Quentin Hoare: Quoted in Hoyles 1977:35)

… the collective skills and energies of workers and peasants are the major productive forces of socialist construction. What socialist construction should also make possible is the actualization of the dreams & the aspirations and hopes of the masses. These too are real resources for socialism.

(Corrigan and Sayer 1984:48)

“Literacy,” whether in scholarly texts, policy documents or as “common sense” knowledge, tends often to be taken as an unqualified good, a mark of individual advancement and broader social progress. There are common day-to-day assumptions at work about what it means to be literate — employable, integrated into society, able to cope with work and family, having access to books and therefore knowledge. There are equally strong assumptions at work about the “pathology” of being illiterate — marginality, incompetence, deprivation, being a ward of society. Economic backwardness, unemployment and technological redundancy are laid at the feet of illiteracy. Conversely literacy skills are signalled as the key to higher productivity, stable family life, competence in consumer society and informed political action at the ballot box. Literacy rates are also taken to be meaningful indicators for measuring a Third World nation’s readiness for “development.”

Built into this conceptualization of literacy is a positivist vision of human evolution, unfolding through the centuries, catching up “backward” nations into an inexorable process of “modernization.” There is a “developmentalist” logic built in, an implicit assumption that the growth of mass literacy that took place in the northern hemisphere will now inexorably reach the mainly southern countries making up the “Third World.” This concept of literacy has also tended to be adopted uncritically by Third World leaders themselves over the post several decades. Third World policy makers, whatever path for development they have espoused, have placed an exaggerated amount of faith in the power of mass schooling. They have seen in literacy the promise of an end to backwardness and marginalization, a pathway to modernity and economic development.

As Quentin Hoare has pointed out, however, education must be distinguished from other social services, such as housing or health care. While these can be treated as “goods” to be shared more equally and increased in purely quantitative ways, there is a very special ambiguity attached to education:

For on the one hand, it represents a vital human need — common to all societies and all people in some form, and as basic as subsistence or shelter. On the other hand, it is a fundamental component of the power structure in any society — the means whereby assent is secured to the values and privileges of the dominant class. Education, in fact, is the point at which vital needs and power structure immediately intersect. It is thus never neutral or “innocent,” as the other social services can sometimes be.

(Quoted in Hoyles 1977:35)

A more critical investigation of the path of mass literacy in western social development, while it in no way denies the liberating power of literacy, shows literacy also to have been a powerful force for broader processes of social control in the emerging capitalist nation states. Mass literacy, the imposition of a language, a way of speaking it, a privileging of certain kinds of experience into knowledge, a regulation of texts, certification for mastery of those texts and not others within a hierarchical system of state-sponsored schooling — all these have been integral to new ways of containment and subordination. Behind the social construction of literacy which posits literacy as an unqualified good, and the more of it the better, lies a history of state-sponsored public schooling that has more to do with large-scale projects of moral regulation and social control than with individual or collective liberation.

Tracing the path in European and later North American social development from the oral culture of the medieval era to the restricted literacy of the early Modern era to the mass literacy that emerged from about 1930 onwards, one finds a gradual, uneven, and at times contradictory process. The shift from oral to literate modes took place over a lengthy period during which the two modes interpenetrated so deeply that any idea of one flourishing without the other was unthinkable. They were also interconnected as differentiation. Twelfth century charters were addressed to “all those seeing and hearing these letters” and often ended with “good-bye.” By the thirteenth century they were already more impersonally cast with such phrases as “Let all persons present and future know.” A similar change took place with regard to wills which, until the thirteenth century, had been basically oral acts, even when recorded, depending on spoken wishes heard by witnesses. By the end of the thirteenth century, the validity of the will depended on its being in the correct documentary form and not on verbal assurances of witnesses. Thus the shift from memory to written records proceeded gradually. (Clanchy 1979)

If in the middle ages in Europe, there was a period when the powers of the oral and the written were intermingled so that the binding power of texts and signatures was doubly guaranteed by the reverence shown to the physical form of the text, this could also be found in early missionary accounts of their activities. Studies of the first contacts between missionaries and Africans in southern Africa by Jean Comaroff point to this appropriation of the power of the word through actions involving the actual texts.

Like the power to transform the world through ritual, literacy seems to have been understood less as an acquired skill than an internal mystical power: the treatment of the body with the written word and newsprint was later to become a regular part of Tswana healing, especially among the illiterate poor.

(Comaroff 1985:203)

There are innumerable problems in giving precise accounts of literacy in the middle ages, as Michael Clanchy’s very illuminating work makes dear. One is that the very accounts of the period use the terms of “litteratus-illiteratus” and “clericus-laicus” in very particular ways. These cannot be translated into their Modern equivalents as a basis for determining whether knights listed as “litteratus” or various groupings listed as “clericus” were literate in the twentieth century sense of that word. (Clanchy 1979)

Another difficulty is the imposition of contemporary assumptions about coupling reading and writing, and about a close association between literacy and spoken languages. Writing was a skill quite distinct from reading and reading was more often linked with speaking aloud than with eyeing script. The variety of written and spoken languages added their own complexities.

The variety also obstructed the rapid spread of literacy, in the modern sense of the majority of people acquiring a minimal capacity to read and write the language they spoke. Elementary instruction in reading and writing started in Latin because that was the traditional language of literacy and sacred Scripture. Those who wrote in vernaculars, whether in Middle English or French, were building novel and complex structures on a foundation of Latin. Neither Middle English nor French was sufficiently standardized … to become the basis of elementary instruction in reading and writing until well after 1380. If a person in Edward I’s reign had learned to read in English or French but not in Latin, he could never become litteratus nor could he have understood the majority of writings circulating in his own life-time because these were in Latin. English and French had to have become common business and literary languages before it was practical or desirable to initiate literate skills with them.

(Clanchy 1979:22, 23)

The powerful institutions of the church and the legal professions had tended to maintain literacy as their preserve during the middle ages. During the mercantile era that preceded the emergence of capitalism, however, literacy was already a vital tool for merchants and navigators. (Hoyles 1977:17) The invention of the printing press at the end of the fifteenth century clearly brought about further dramatic changes.

The Printing Press -- and a World Mediated by Texts

The pioneering work of Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Eisenstein 1979) begins to document this little acknowledged revolution in communications and the relationships between the communications shift and other developments associated with the transition from medieval to early modern times. While Eisenstein admits readily to printing’s role in spurring the spread of literacy, her main project is to trace not the shift from oral to literate culture, but from one kind of literate culture to another. The transition from scribal culture to print culture created a literate environment of a totally different nature.

Eisenstein makes a set of thought-provoking conjectures on the impact of printing on western society and thought. (Eisenstein 1981) She singles out four major areas: dissemination, standardization, editing and preservation. First, the mere fact of dissemination and access provided by printed texts ended the traditions of wandering scholars travelling to consult texts or commentators spending a life-time on single texts. Suddenly texts were available. The first century of printing was characterized by intellectual ferment as new combinations of old ideas suddenly made accessible resulted in entirely new systems of thought.

The impact of standardization was profound. Textually mediated representations of experience were available for the first time. Some of the most important were the pictorial statements — maps, charts, diagrams, the uniform reference guides such as calendars, thesauruses, dictionaries, the regular systems of notation — grammatical, mathematical, musical. All of these prefigured major developments in science and bureaucracy, whole ways of viewing day-to-day experience and mediating that experience through texts.

Similarly, the printing conventions having to do with editing and reorganizing texts led to procedures of codifying, clarifying, cataloguing. Built-in aids to the reader appeared — title pages, graduated type, running heads, footnotes, tables of contents — all of which gave new access and new ways of viewing reality. From this came rational systems, new ways of bureaucratic organization, ranging from law books offering legal precedents and the beginnings of a codified legal system to new views of history, science and literature.

The very fact of preservation had radical implications for patterns of cultural and institutional change. The energies devoted by scribal culture to seeking out and re-copying documents gave way to fixed bodies of literature widely disseminated, a textually mediated sense of self and world beginning to emerge, the beginning of the Modern knowledge industry. All of this had huge ramifications for state formation.

Studies of dynastic consolidation and/or of nationalism might well devote more space to the advent of printing. Typography arrested linguistic drift, enriched as well as standardized vernaculars, and paved the way for the more deliberate purification and codification of all European languages. Randomly patterned, sixteenth-century type-casting largely determined the subsequent elaboration of national mythologies on the part of certain separate groups with multilingual dynastic states. The duplication of vernacular primers and translations contributed in other ways to nationalism. A “mother’s” tongue learned “naturally” at home would be reinforced by inculcation of a homogenized print-made language mastered while still young when learning to read. During the most impressionable years of childhood, the eye would first see a more standardized version of what the ear heard. Particularly after grammar schools gave primary instruction on reading by using vernacular instead of Latin readers, linguistic “roots” and rootedness in one’s homeland would be entangled.

(Eisenstein 1979:61/62)

Ivan Illich puts forward the same line of argument in the examination of “vernacular values” in his provocative study, Shadow Work. (Illich 1981) Illich explores the moment in fifteenth centuiy Europe when women and men were taken from their immediate world which included ready communicative competence in multiple local languages to a standardization of language and text. He argues that whatever power for domination was gained by Queen Isabella of Spain in authorizing the famed voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492 pales into insignificance against the power for domination gained through another project which gained royal support at the time. This was Elio Antonio de Nibrija’s first Spanish grammar.

Literacy and Protestantism

Mass literacy proceeded, then, through a slow process of putting down roots, a trajectory not to be confused with the history of schooling, for in fact the two did not proceed at the same rate nor were they subject to the same gravitational pulls. Of these, there were many — the printing press, Protestantism and the emergence of capitalism all being fundamental ones.

The restricted literacy of the middle ages religion in which the clergy were sole depositees and interpreters and preached to the ignorant masses gave way to Protestantism. This meant not only mass access to the “book” but differing interpretations of it — and entry to a whole new age. In some countries state and church combined to regulate literacy. In Sweden, for example, literacy and religion were integrally linked with successful certification in literacy necessary by the local priest as a prerequisite for marriage. Nor was this evangelical zeal nationally bounded. The Protestant missionary societies that formed in the nineteenth century took their preoccupation with individual, direct access to scripture to the far comers of the earth, and encouraged a vast enterprise of codifying local languages and providing translations of scripture into multiple tongues.

The great religions of the Book, Protestantism, soon to be joined by the Counter Reformation, could probably have made do with a modicum of reading ability on the part of the faithful. & But the market economy, backed by and relying upon the machinery of the centralized state, expanded the role of writing as a necessary condition of modernization.

(Furet & Ozouf 1977 in Graff 1981:216/217)

Literacy and Economic Development: Which Comes First?

The detailed history of literacy in Europe and North America from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries has only begun to be reconstructed.¹ An important theme of these studies is a re-examination of the link between literacy and economic development. While there is a good deal of debate about ways of measuring literacy and its actual incidence (Stone 1969; Sanderson 1972; Cressy 1980), none of the detailed case studies of literacy bears out the widely held notion of a direct, causal link between literacy and economic growth. Yet this argument continues to be held dear by the human capital school of education (Blaug 1970) and those espousing theories for Third World development based on minimum literacy levels for economic take-off (Anderson and Bowman 1965), “modernization” (Almond 1960; Apter 1965), “stages of economic growth” (Rostow 1960), or the 1990 World Bank rediscovery of the social dimensions of adjustment.

In England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, schools were specialized institutions for instruction in literacy skills. Few attended regularly or stayed longer than a year or two. Practical skills were learned through households and work groups as part of a broad pattern of socialization of which apprenticeship is a well-known but formalized example.

Thus insofar as economic growth in this period entailed the acquisition of a large number of practical skills by a growing proportion of the population, developments in literacy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Acronyms
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Literacy: People’s Power/Assimilation of a Social Order
• 2 The World of Workplace Literacy
• 3 The Colonial State as Educator
• 4 “Schooling”: Path from Indigenous to Assimilated?
• 5 Literacy, Popular State and People’s Power
• 6 Time for “Schooling” at CIM
• 7 Classrooms: Spaces for Regulated Communication(s)
• 8 Power Differentiation in the CIM “Village”
• 9 Literacy and the Practice of Democracy
• Sources Consulted
• About the Book