When I was in the 2d grade I mistakingly took my reading skill as inadequate. Then one day my mother took me to the public library where I took out several books (one, I think, being one of the Oz books). I began to read and never stopped until macular degeneration imposed a stop. I read so effortlessly and so continuously that I lost any ability to understand why anyone could have difficulty in reading. (Apparently that deficiency in understanding is shared by most literate, or at least highly literate persons.) That's what I did, I read. It was both a continuing pleasure as well as a mode of relating to and absorbing world's larger than my own. This pleasure, this activity, apparently generates pleasure in the company of those who share the pleasure and the skill. What did we talk about? Arms, books¸& men of unusual distinction. (Pound, Sigismundo Cantos). Because now I find it acutely painful to read, though my pleasure in writing and conversation remains, I often misconstrue posts to which I then respond in a way that fails to honor the writer's purpose and the core arguments of their posts. Doubtless I shall continue to do so, but I will offer this justification. Quite often, I believe, though my post may be irrelevant to the other's post, their core content is not irrelevant to the world in which we live. Positive responses which I often receive off-list and occasionally on list seem to attest to that. Hence I do not claim that this post is a relevant to Dennis Claxon's post I do claim that I have something to say _suggested_ by some element in that post.
So far as I could tell during my 41 years of teaching college students, a rather small proportion of them took positive and aggressive pleasure in the act of reading. My first wife was tone deaf; once at a concert she made the classical error of thinking the concert had started when the orchestra was only warming up. I find it mostly a bother, sometimes somewhat unpleasant, to listen to the music of Beethoven, Brahms, & Mahler -- or almost any other composer later than Mozart. I can listen to Mozart and almost all baroque music for hours (without having the slightest idea of what the music is doing: I just enjoy the song. I escaped all musical training I have no understanding of what people mean when they speak of the 'theme' of a musical composition. I have no way of knowing whether or not I would have experienced organized training in listening to or producing music as a pleasure, an acceptable though somewhat curious way of spending time, or as painful. Some certainly do experience such training as painful.
A fairly large part of the population experiences (in their school years) training in reading, or training in other subjects _through_ reading, as painful, sometimes as acutely painful. The same is true of writing, though as I know from talking to a number of students over the years, quite a few who experience reading as pleasurable and profitable experience writing as painful or acutely painful; they are unable to write a coherent paragraph in complete sentences about some text but they can engage in meaningful conversation in respect to the text in question. There seems to be no necessary connection between reading ability and the practice of writing. Computers may change this for some, assuming they have sufficiently mastered touch typing. That is, speed of transcription seems to narrow the gap between speaking and writing.
In any case, there exists no empirical grounds for assuming any particular relationship between "intelligence"(itself a doubtful category: Check Gould) and either reading or writing. It is false to assume that those are skills 'open to' acquisition by all or even most persons. (One clear case has been identified: dyslexia. There is no reason whatever not to take it for granted that many other barriers exist to mastering the technology of reading or writing.)
I think it is clear that large numbers of people can though training on the job master a large assortment of skills without needing to supplement that training with printed manuals. I would assume that technically 'illiterate' people could effectively train others in reading. (The elaborate training of elementary-school teachers is a vast waste of human energy and time.)
Take another perspective. (I took relatively few standardized tests during my years of schooling. The only ones I remember taking were scholarship exams and the battery of 'career' tests we took in Air Force basic training. My scores always suffered by my inability to imagine three-dimensional shapes from two-dimensional shapes. I couldn't, for example, pick ut the right tool to be used to make a given change in the three-dimensional object portrayed in two dimensions. As a result my lowest score in Air Force career fields was in heavy-equipment operation. Fortunately I had no desire to operate heavy equipment. My point: There exist a rather large number of human skills which are NOT available to many humans. But literate people seem to suffer from the superstition that THEIR skill is of courseavailable to all; it requires only (a) the will and (b) competent training (mislabeled "Education"). This leads to the unbelievably stupid conclusion that the so-called "Education System" can be judged by its success rate in turning out "literate persons."
That for 12 to 16 years of their life, in a mandatory process of training/certification, the whole population would be required to endure endless hours of reading and writing cannot be seen as anything less than deliberate cruelty. The widespread assumption among the literate that literacy is somehow a moral good, that it marks off those capable of full (and competent) participation in the public life of the society, is probably one of the two or three most effective ideological and theoretical supports of capitalism. A successful anti-capitalist movement is dependent on the breaking of this cruel ideology.
Do the literate HAVE TO BE sadists? It would seem so, but I think there are sufficient exceptions to bring that we need not assume so. Most literates are probably, with some effort, capable of simple recognition of shared humanity, though on the whole the evidence is to the contrary.
I understand that some people can wiggle their ears. Some can sing the soprano roles in Mozart. Some delight inmountain-climbing. Some delight in their achievement of literacy. On the whole only the last group allows their particular competence to corrupt their understanding of the social order and of the potential of human life.
Carrol