What is literacy?

Literacy itself is the ability to read and understand a written language. Literacy is a privilege, not a right. If you take literacy to a broader sense it can meant the knowledge of or competency in a subject. But literacy is most commonly understood as the ability to read or write at a proficient level.

But it also must be learned as Douglass makes clear in his essay “Learning to Read and Write.” Douglass fights to learn how to read and write as he is a slave and it technically outlawed. In his essay though he does more than talk about how to read and write, but he also shows his readers what it was like to be a slave and how the issue of slavery moved others – to be cold or to be sympathetic – and in his quest to understand a word we see how a person can pick up on the connotation of a word without knowing the denotation.

At first I was quite confused as to how Siegel’s “The World Is All That Is the Case” fit into literacy. But then I had the epiphany that literacy as changed since Douglass’ time. There is now such a thing as computer and internet literacy, which is the ability to navigate and successfully use the computer and the internet. With literacy comes responsibility, as Siegel makes a good point using a quote from Gates about the dangers of the internet.