potential significance of learning to read and write, they have provided
overwhelming evidence to show that children’s thinking about language
changes in important ways with the acquisition of literate skills in the early
school years (Ferreiro and Teberosky 1982; Olson 2001). Precisely what is
involved, of course, remains subject to ongoing research and debate. I shall
argue that one can be a successful speaker of a language and yet lack to a
remarkable degree any consciousness of certain aspects of language
and that learning to read and write necessarily brings important aspects
of language into consciousness. Writing serves up a very distinctive con-
sciousness of one’s language; writing, the claim is, turns language into an
object of thought.
THE CRITICS
Aside from a generalized aversion to any theory that sounds monocausal,
the central criticism of the literacy hypothesis is its apparent emphasis on
the mere fact of writing rather than upon the diverse uses to which
writing has been and may be put. The importance of the uses of writing
is, of course, not controversial. Attention to the uses of writing has
sponsored a great deal of important research that is directed to sorting
out how precisely texts were created and read for various purposes
including literature, history, and philosophy in various cultural contexts,
including those of ancient Greece and Rome but also local contexts such
as prayer meetings and reading groups. The more nuanced question is
whether those functions are themselves distorted or altered by the facts
of writing and literacy. How, for example, is a contract different from an
agreement? And how the same?
Yet the critics have shown that literacy plays less a causal role than an
ancillary or instrumental one in psychological and social change. Literacy
played a role in the elaboration and adjustment of preexisting structures
and practices more so than in the actual creation of novel ones. Thus
writing extended the rule of law but did not bring it into existence
(Clanchy 1979 [2nd ed. 1993]), writing preserved literature but did not
create it (Powell 2002), and writing advanced debate in Classical Greece
but did not give rise to it (Lloyd 1979; Thomas 1989). Even medieval
religious discourse, although heavily reliant on written record, was carried
out largely through oral means (Carruthers 1990). Further, empirical
studies of the effects of knowledge of writing on the reasoning processes
of individuals, once thought to be decisive (Luria 1976), often fail to
replicate. In general, the effects of literacy, narrowly defined as the
ability to read and write, were found to be modest, whereas literacy,
more broadly defined as systematic induction into the traditions of liter-
acy through schooling, was found to be dramatic (Scribner and Cole
1981; Bernardo 1995; Halverson 1992). Finally, the attempt to change
individuals and societies through mass literacy campaigns such as
388 Epilogue