Higher education discourse is clotted with a surfeit of claims made by advocates lobbying to attain the status of a literacy for the particular configuration of abilities, skills, or forms of knowledge and competency fostered within their purview. The Chronicle, to give just a few examples, has carried a “plea for spatial literacy”; an argument that “in the end, we are all poorly served by an academic community that does not promote biocultural literacy”; and a notice of major foundation support for digital-media literacy. Not surprisingly, the calls for “financial literacy” and “economic literacy” are the loudest right now. The idea, it seems, is that a literacy stands a better chance of making the list of shared goals for student learning. Depending on where they go to school, students today may be expected to achieve some level of quantitative literacy, cultural literacy, technological literacy, scientific literacy, informational literacy, statistical literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, civic literacy, digital literacy, and so on (and on, and on . . .); there’s even something called “Diaspora literacy.”

However limitless the list of literacies pressing for curricular attention may seem, it’s worth noting that this is contested ground. The Chronicle has also carried arguments against, for example, information literacy (“the wrong solution to the wrong problem”). Perhaps the best-known antiliteracy argument was made by the mathematics and computer science professor Paul De Palma in “http://www.when_is_enough_enough?.com,” a widely circulated (and cleverly titled) essay first published in the American Scholar. Yet as compelling as De Palma’s examination of “just who benefits from the computer literacy movement (and who pays for it)” may be, even he had to acknowledge that the odds don’t favor the opposition in a dispute over anything described as a literacy. “Sadly, the proponents of computer literacy have won the high ground by virtue of the term itself. Who would argue with literacy? . . . Literacy, like motherhood and apple pie in the America of my youth, is unassailable.” Read the rest of this entry »