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Literacy in Theory and Practice
This book challenges conventional theories about literacy, and the practices which often arise from them. It attempts to provide a new perspective through which the variety of literacy practices across different cultures can be viewed and from which the practical issues that arise in specific literacy campaigns and programmes can be approached. Dr Street first examines the explicit theories developed about literacy within different academic disciplines, on the premise that these underlie statements about literacy within development campaigns and in everyday usage. He analyses in detail arguments about the 'technical' and 'neutral' nature of literacy and its supposed 'cognitive' consequences in the work of some psychologists, linguists and social anthropologists. He claims that these amount to a coherent but flawed model that he terms the 'autonomous' model of literacy. Against this he poses an 'ideological' model, one which pays greater attention to the social structure. He attempts to bring together recent shifts in this direction in writings on literacy and to construct a coherent model for further work.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 1985
About the author
Brian V. Street
33 books1 followerBrian V. Street is Chair of Language in Education in the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s College London.
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November 2, 2025
It’s likely, if you read this book, it will not have the impact on you it has had on me. So, I’m going to explain why this book has had such a large impact on me.
When I was doing my master’s degree, we read a book on research methods and in that they talked about Luria’s research in the Soviet central Asian republics. The idea was that the people there were living under form of social life – essentially feudalism – and they wanted to see if that form social structure had an impact on their cognitive abilities. Marxism essentially says that social relations ought to impact cognition. Luria wrote a book on this called Cognitive Development: It’s Cultural and Social Foundations. I was so curious about this that I spend a day at the State Library reading room (the only library I could find that actually had a copy of the book) reading it. The reading room has recently been named one of the world’s best libraries – it is absolutely no hardship spending time there. Anyway, the book lived up to expectations. The main take away from it is that people who are illiterate find it almost impossible to do logical operations like syllogisms. They also tend to struggle with abstract categories. My favourite example is when he gave women lots of different pieces of coloured material and asked them to group them. The women would start and then start again and then again. Finally, one of the researchers said, some people group the yellow ones together, and the green ones and so on. The women looked at him as if he was insane – 'but that one is the colour of milk and that one the colour of goat’s piss – you can’t put them together'. The syllogism I remember went something like, in places where it always snows the bears are white. In Siberia there is always snow on the ground – what colour are the bears? The answer they got was, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been there’. Sometimes the sheer frustration of the researchers is obvious. I’ve reviewed this book here on GoodReads.
Then, shortly after this, I did a course on the causes of success and failure at school, and it changed my life. In many ways, I don't think I would be doing my current job if it wasn’t for that course. In part, we learned of the work of Basil Bernstein. Bernstein took a group of boys from working class backgrounds and a group from middle class backgrounds and got them to explain a cartoon to him. The boys were matched for IQ – from memory they were 5 years old or something – before either of the groups of boys had learned to read. Anyway, what he found was that the working class boys used very different language codes to explain the cartoon than the middle class boys did. He said the middle class boys used an explicit code – that is, you didn’t need to be looking at the cartoon to understand what they were describing – they were talking like a book, explicit about all of the details, so that it was clear what was being described, regardless of whether you were looking at the cartoon or not. The working class boys used what he called a restricted code – restricted in the sense that what they said was only clear if you were sitting with them looking at the cartoon too. Bernstein said everyone uses a restricted code most of the time – we know our audiences and what they know, so, we leave out details that are otherwise ‘obvious’. It is just that the working class boys did not have access to an elaborative code at all – and this code is the one that is rewarded at school. That means that the middle class boys were likely to succeed at school – and be considered smarter – almost entirely due to their access to an elaborated language code, rather than any 'higher IQ' or whatever else.
As you can see – two pieces of research pointing to one conclusion – literacy gives cognitive benefits to people – not least in their ability to more from the concrete and the immediate to the abstract and theoretical. Three cheers for literacy.
Bernstein’s point was that if it is socially necessary for working class boys to have the same cognitive abilities as middle class boys – the school should provide access to an elaborative code and teach this explicitly - and this is a form of literacy, in fact, it is literacy. This is much the same conclusion that Luria came to as well. He said that access to abstract thinking came immediately from becoming literate.
This book challenges this view, which he refers to as the autonomous model – that links literacy with rationality. He challenges this with what he calls the ideological model – essentially, that literacy is always literacy within a context and that context is always political. That is, literacy isn’t an autonomous thing separated from the society in which it appears, but is deeply embedded within that society and the power relationships that exist within it. There isn’t one, single literacy – in fact, it is very hard to find a totally ‘illiterate’ group of people – but rather there are many literacies all serving very social and cultural purposes within any society. The point isn’t to find the universal attributes of literacy and to teach those – but rather to understand the uses to which literacy is being put and, if possible, to broaden access to these within the context of the lifeworlds of those you are helping to become more literate. In this sense, the author says Freire did not go far enough in his ‘teach children to read the word and the world’ – as he had not fully shaken off the assumptions of the autonomous model of literacy - that is, that rationality is a function of literacy and is determined by it.
This is not to say that we should not teach people literacy – but rather that we should not take it for granted that literacy provides rationality. He gives multiple examples that challenge this. Not least in showing, contrary to Luria’s work (although he doesn’t directly reference this) that what are described as pre-literate societies are anything but lacking in the ability to logically reason. Often what we take to be a clear example of a lack of rationality is a matter of the form of ‘their’ reasoning being different from that of ‘our’ presumed higher form. He also points out that actually, very few people in the west are rational in the way we assume literacy provides – and that it isn’t clear which forms of literacy actually provide this form of rationality. He points out that our linking of rationality and literacy is coherent mostly because it is essentially circular. But which is the cause and which is the effect is much harder to pin down than we generally assume.
He explains all this referencing the work of Shirley Brice Heath – a book I’m now going to have to read. I did read her What No Bedtime Story Does years ago, but will now need to read her actual book Ways With Words. Soon, hopefully.
I’m reading through all of this because I’ve become very interested in what is called the science of reading – something very much akin to the autonomous school of literacy. I want to reiterate, that I do think literacy is very important and, like kindness, we should spread it far and wide. But perhaps less because it provides access to the wonderful world of rational thought, but rather because it provides access to the inside workings of different minds and ways of being. That rather than seeing how much less rationality other people have – how much further down the evolutionary cognitive ladder they are when compared to us – we should rather try to understand the social and cultural foundations of their current literacy practices and therefore to see how we might enhance these social and cultural worlds by exposing them – and ourselves – to different literate practices. That is, rather than assuming everyone else stands in deficit to us, perhaps a more modest approach would be less alienating for those we are trying to ‘lift up’ while also providing us with a broader perspective of the advantages of other people's current literacy practices.
This is a deeply interesting book. Like I said, it has held a mirror up to some of my most cherished assumptions and, as is true with all particularly clear mirrors, has made me wince at the reflection it has presented to me.
When I was doing my master’s degree, we read a book on research methods and in that they talked about Luria’s research in the Soviet central Asian republics. The idea was that the people there were living under form of social life – essentially feudalism – and they wanted to see if that form social structure had an impact on their cognitive abilities. Marxism essentially says that social relations ought to impact cognition. Luria wrote a book on this called Cognitive Development: It’s Cultural and Social Foundations. I was so curious about this that I spend a day at the State Library reading room (the only library I could find that actually had a copy of the book) reading it. The reading room has recently been named one of the world’s best libraries – it is absolutely no hardship spending time there. Anyway, the book lived up to expectations. The main take away from it is that people who are illiterate find it almost impossible to do logical operations like syllogisms. They also tend to struggle with abstract categories. My favourite example is when he gave women lots of different pieces of coloured material and asked them to group them. The women would start and then start again and then again. Finally, one of the researchers said, some people group the yellow ones together, and the green ones and so on. The women looked at him as if he was insane – 'but that one is the colour of milk and that one the colour of goat’s piss – you can’t put them together'. The syllogism I remember went something like, in places where it always snows the bears are white. In Siberia there is always snow on the ground – what colour are the bears? The answer they got was, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been there’. Sometimes the sheer frustration of the researchers is obvious. I’ve reviewed this book here on GoodReads.
Then, shortly after this, I did a course on the causes of success and failure at school, and it changed my life. In many ways, I don't think I would be doing my current job if it wasn’t for that course. In part, we learned of the work of Basil Bernstein. Bernstein took a group of boys from working class backgrounds and a group from middle class backgrounds and got them to explain a cartoon to him. The boys were matched for IQ – from memory they were 5 years old or something – before either of the groups of boys had learned to read. Anyway, what he found was that the working class boys used very different language codes to explain the cartoon than the middle class boys did. He said the middle class boys used an explicit code – that is, you didn’t need to be looking at the cartoon to understand what they were describing – they were talking like a book, explicit about all of the details, so that it was clear what was being described, regardless of whether you were looking at the cartoon or not. The working class boys used what he called a restricted code – restricted in the sense that what they said was only clear if you were sitting with them looking at the cartoon too. Bernstein said everyone uses a restricted code most of the time – we know our audiences and what they know, so, we leave out details that are otherwise ‘obvious’. It is just that the working class boys did not have access to an elaborative code at all – and this code is the one that is rewarded at school. That means that the middle class boys were likely to succeed at school – and be considered smarter – almost entirely due to their access to an elaborated language code, rather than any 'higher IQ' or whatever else.
As you can see – two pieces of research pointing to one conclusion – literacy gives cognitive benefits to people – not least in their ability to more from the concrete and the immediate to the abstract and theoretical. Three cheers for literacy.
Bernstein’s point was that if it is socially necessary for working class boys to have the same cognitive abilities as middle class boys – the school should provide access to an elaborative code and teach this explicitly - and this is a form of literacy, in fact, it is literacy. This is much the same conclusion that Luria came to as well. He said that access to abstract thinking came immediately from becoming literate.
This book challenges this view, which he refers to as the autonomous model – that links literacy with rationality. He challenges this with what he calls the ideological model – essentially, that literacy is always literacy within a context and that context is always political. That is, literacy isn’t an autonomous thing separated from the society in which it appears, but is deeply embedded within that society and the power relationships that exist within it. There isn’t one, single literacy – in fact, it is very hard to find a totally ‘illiterate’ group of people – but rather there are many literacies all serving very social and cultural purposes within any society. The point isn’t to find the universal attributes of literacy and to teach those – but rather to understand the uses to which literacy is being put and, if possible, to broaden access to these within the context of the lifeworlds of those you are helping to become more literate. In this sense, the author says Freire did not go far enough in his ‘teach children to read the word and the world’ – as he had not fully shaken off the assumptions of the autonomous model of literacy - that is, that rationality is a function of literacy and is determined by it.
This is not to say that we should not teach people literacy – but rather that we should not take it for granted that literacy provides rationality. He gives multiple examples that challenge this. Not least in showing, contrary to Luria’s work (although he doesn’t directly reference this) that what are described as pre-literate societies are anything but lacking in the ability to logically reason. Often what we take to be a clear example of a lack of rationality is a matter of the form of ‘their’ reasoning being different from that of ‘our’ presumed higher form. He also points out that actually, very few people in the west are rational in the way we assume literacy provides – and that it isn’t clear which forms of literacy actually provide this form of rationality. He points out that our linking of rationality and literacy is coherent mostly because it is essentially circular. But which is the cause and which is the effect is much harder to pin down than we generally assume.
He explains all this referencing the work of Shirley Brice Heath – a book I’m now going to have to read. I did read her What No Bedtime Story Does years ago, but will now need to read her actual book Ways With Words. Soon, hopefully.
I’m reading through all of this because I’ve become very interested in what is called the science of reading – something very much akin to the autonomous school of literacy. I want to reiterate, that I do think literacy is very important and, like kindness, we should spread it far and wide. But perhaps less because it provides access to the wonderful world of rational thought, but rather because it provides access to the inside workings of different minds and ways of being. That rather than seeing how much less rationality other people have – how much further down the evolutionary cognitive ladder they are when compared to us – we should rather try to understand the social and cultural foundations of their current literacy practices and therefore to see how we might enhance these social and cultural worlds by exposing them – and ourselves – to different literate practices. That is, rather than assuming everyone else stands in deficit to us, perhaps a more modest approach would be less alienating for those we are trying to ‘lift up’ while also providing us with a broader perspective of the advantages of other people's current literacy practices.
This is a deeply interesting book. Like I said, it has held a mirror up to some of my most cherished assumptions and, as is true with all particularly clear mirrors, has made me wince at the reflection it has presented to me.
September 27, 2013
I admit this book got better near the end, particularly the decade's worth of ethnographic field work in North East Iran, but getting there seemed like a lot of literary trashtalk only to reveal so much 'dead wood' in autonomous literacy schemes. Not entirely convince that the ideological model is all that better.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews