processes of those so affected. The sponsors of that hypothesis produced a
series of influential papers and books that explored the relations between
an oral and a written tradition, between traditional and modern societies,
and between oral and written language. The legacies of writing were seen
as including, on the social side, the growth of complex social and bureau-
cratic organizations and, on the cognitive side, an accumulative and
increasingly reflective and critical attitude to knowledge and belief, not
to mention the invention of narrative fiction. The products of writing,
they argued, were not only history but historians, not only philosophy but
philosophers, not only record keeping but also accountants, laws but also
lawyers, written narratives but also writers and readers. And so on.
The literacy hypothesis should not be confused with the traditional
assumption about literacy. It is almost universally assumed that literacy is
simply a good, a good of such value that it is appropriate to impose it on
everyone whether through universal schooling or international literacy
campaigns, and that a major responsibility of modern states is to guaran-
tee universal literacy. This traditional assumption, going back at least to
the Enlightenment, was that literacy has direct causal and utilitarian
consequences; if people become literate they will necessarily make social
and cognitive advances. The literacy hypothesis of the 1960s changed the
topic in a subtle but important way. It turned the question away from that
of how best to advance literacy into a set of scientific questions: what was
the nature of literacy; what were the uses and legacies of writing and
written culture? For whom and under what circumstances was it benefi-
cial? The question is no longer how to extend our literacy but rather to ask
about the implications of literacy. I take this to be the primary legacy of
the literacy hypothesis.
Of course, these writers were not the first to see writing as of revolu-
tionary significance. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers such as
Vico, Condorset, and Rousseau took the form of writing as indication of
social evolution: those who wrote with pictures the most primitive, those
with an alphabet the most developed. Although our modern literacy
theorists lack an allegiance to the notion of linear progress, they nonethe-
less advocate the view that writing altered social practices and conse-
quently, cognitive ones, and that these cognitive ones defined our
modernity. Bureaucratic social structures and certain modes of thinking
were proposed as consequences of literacy.
Some writers were quick to point out that the claims for literacy were
overstated and its effects were context dependent. Others noted the close
relation between speaking and writing and so have questioned the useful-
ness of the oral-literate formula. But the literacy hypothesis received a
ringing endorsement from educators. It confirmed the long held belief
that early education, centered on learning to read and write, was a univer-
sally valid goal. In fact this belief was endorsed by the UN charter
in which learning to read is now enshrined as a universal human
right. Although researchers, such as myself, are more guarded about the
Why Literacy Matters, Then and Now 387