Defend Democracy: Literacy and Citizenship

               What basic conditions does democracy require? If democracy requires elections, then reading might be one fundamental condition.  Reading makes it possible to review candidate statements, follow news reports about the impacts of candidate policies, write letters or emails to let their elected representatives know where they stand, and draft proposals for elected leaders to consider.

Yet literacy is not widely held to be a condition for democracy, and many democracies have surprisingly large numbers of illiterate citizens as voters. UNESCO estimates range from 800 million to one billion people globally are without the ability to read or count at a level that allows for full social participation as citizens.

Those who are without these skills often abandon the notion that they are full participants in their government, leaving the business of governing to educated classes and experts. Their normal lives do not include the assumption that they can participate in public discussion and in managing their own affairs, what some call subalternity. 

This abandonment of citizenship is a blow to democracy. Yet subalterns can transform their assumption that the governments of the territories where they live will never serve their interests.

Many citizens cannot read, including those in wealthy countries like the United States. Recent data shows that 19% of the U.S. adult population does not have basic reading skills, and 29% do not have basic number skills, a slight increase in illiteracy over the past quarter century. In countries widely accepted as democratic yet struggling with profound inequality, like Mexico and India, very large numbers of their citizens are not literate: over 4 million adults in Mexico and over 250 million adults in India. Other countries may hold elections but many doubt that democracy is possible when large social sectors remain unable to read, as in Egypt  where some 20 miillion are illiterate, and Brazil, where over 10 million are unable to read a ballot. Other countries claim to be democracies when large percentages of their population are not literate: including some of those least successful at democratizing wealth and social equity, like Bangladesh (25%) and Haiti (40%). 

Should citizens be able to read? The answer to that question is not settled in policy and judicial arenas. A landmark court decision was just issued by a Federal Court of Appeals in the United States stating the literacy is foundation for citizens, for example, but that decision may be appealed. The judge in the case noted that white people have repeatedly withheld education as a way to deny political power to African Americans and members of other groups. The United States Supreme Court has not been supportive of educational equality, so if the recent decision is appealed it may not have long-term traction. Even when court decisions force states to increase school funding, as in a California February, 2020  court decision, the courts may not mandate enough funding to correct the many problems causing poor school performance. The specific problems in Detroit included adequate physical facilities, qualified teachers consistently present in classrooms, and relevant textbooks (Detroit students were given biology textbooks for physics classes).

Work with subalterns can take literacy and other citizenship skills as its goal. This work would need to include the interruption of subaltern notions of their normal lives as cut off from public participation, what Gayatri Spivak calls the “uncoercive rearrangement of the desires” for subalterns. This work requires building an infrastructure that can recognize subaltern desires operating in terms that differ from those of European-derived education and liberal humanism, so that what subaltern communities are always already saying can be heard and recognized as political speech.

Rather than attempting to better the subaltern conditions along Eurocentric avenues of development, this infrastructural work will have to change what education means to begin to recognize subalterns and literate rural communities in the global south as agents of production.  This work may produce democratic mechanisms and forms of social justice that can accommodate rather than block subalterns from access to mobility and citizenship.

Rather than working for the narrow interests of the educated and wealthy, this infrastructural building project requires that we rethink the interests we serve and consider serving those with whom we have been taught to not identify, our Others.  

If those reading this blogpost are literate, then subalterns are you Others. If you have voted in an election, then your Others are those who never vote. If you have been served by your elected representatives, then subalterns are your Others.

This transformation of political work can become an entry into democracy for all, rather than for the few. It begins with illiteracy, with those who have long been shut out of democracy, the unrepresentable, the others of democracy.