To Ponder

On literacy and slavery

Henry Allen Bullock notes that in the South, Hugh Bryan opened a Negro school in 1740, and that by 1755, schools for slaves were opened in Virginia. In general, however, while education opportunities for American children were available in the second half of the eighteenth century in the South, they were severely curtailed there in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the Industrial Revolution called for greater supplies of cotton fiber, as the plantation system changed from a patriarchal to an economic base, and as the abolition movement gained ground and published greater numbers of documents, slave owners worried that education would encourage discontent among the slaves. So while community-based education in the slave quarter community and in churches was a powerful force, while some African American children in the South attended what were known as “night schools” (after white students left school, children of color would take their places, sometimes until ten at night), and while some children were taught to read and write by sympathetic slaveholders, many children were forbidden to attend school. A number of Southern states passed laws making illegal the school-based literacy education of people of color. Mississippi, for example, passed legislation forbidding the education of slaves or free Negroes in 1823; Louisiana forbade the teaching of slaves in 1830; North Carolina and Virginia, in 1831; and Alabama, in 1832. The North Carolina legislature explained its reason for the prohibition: “The teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion, to the manifest injury of the citizens of this State” (qtd. in Cohen 1622).

Lucille M. Schultz, The Young Composers: Compositions’ Beginnings in the Nineteenth Century, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999, 18.

On competing views of technology and literacy

Two popular representations of technology currently contend for our national attention in explaining the increasingly strong links between computer technology and literacy that characterize our culture in the late-twentieth-century America: technology as a boon and technology as a burden. In the first representation, constructed by works such as McLuhan’s Gutenburg Galaxy (1962), Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995), Rheinold’s Virtual Community (1994), and Hiltz and Turoff’s Networked Nation (1993), computer-based communication environments are portrayed as progressive arenas for social exchange and involvement. In the second representation, described in works such as Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (1995); Sanders’ A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age (1995), and Birkerts’s Gutenburg Elegies (1994), computer-based environments for the practice of literacy are described as contributing to the decline of both reading and writing skills, as well as to individuals’ inability to concentrate over sustained periods, the rise of violence, and the progressive social alienation of generations born after 1970. In these representations, both our fears and our hopes for technology are played out dramatically, if not always accurately, in terms of an oppositional relationship. The polemic constituted by the opposing visions, unfortunately, serves to distract us from more challenging social tasks: understanding the robust and far-reaching cultural relationships that support the technology-literacy link and recognizing the ways in which this link serves to exacerbate patterns of literacy based on race and poverty.

Cynthia L. Selfe, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, The Importance of Paying Attention, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999, 26.