Literacy and Reading

The podcast I have listened to deals with literacy and reading, in particular. We usually take it for granted that a five or six year-old child develops the ability to read to acquire knowledge about the word surrounding him. However, the actual history of literacy began about 6000 years ago when people started to use the first written symbols.Those were initially used for commercial purposes. It took rather a long time to end with written symbols used for communication.

 Various hieroglyphs, icons and other characters have been used as means of communication since ancient times. Later, most of these characters developed into an alphabet, where each letter encoded a particular sound. However, nowadays in some countries, for example in China, they still use hieroglyphs. Both using hieroglyphs and using alphabets have their own advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of having an alphabet is that if you know how the word is spelled you can easily pronounce it. But communication is possible only if people share a common language. The advantage of having hieroglyphs is that people speaking different languages can communicate with each other by interpreting those hieroglyphs. For example, in China, which is a multicultural country, people speaking different languages can use and understand those hieroglyphs.

It was interesting for me to learn that Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, objected to reading and favoured a dialogue. Reading was like the internet of his time. He thought that it hinders critical thinking: people believe everything they read. In reading they have no chance of asking questions or arguing. He opposed reading to a dialogue saying that in face to face communication you can always have the chance to ask the speaker to explain something, or to argue something.

In my opinion Socrates was right, nothing can compare to real communication. Of course, books are great providers of information, but it does not mean that we should believe everything we read. We should always analyse any type of information we get, and also should be able to show a critical approach to what we read.