400
PARTISAN REVIEW
argument has been true in the exceptions. For example, to accuse
eminent and original writers and orators of improper usage is foolish.
In 1980, this argument of rebellion is heard only faintly, and at that
only among ethnic minorities whose rebellion against "good" English
has a different and more legitimate basis. Perhaps a decade or so ago
this kind of glib cultural critique was used by the white liberal middle
class to justify a rejection of a traditional culture. Unfortunately, now
all one encounters is the lack of motivation to care about or know
language sufficiently well even to rebel against it.
This absence of motivation to become literate, and thereby to
recognize correct usage, is widespread and links the new illiteracy
among the affluent with the more basic and historic illiteracy of the
poor. Rather than view this absence of motivation as the mere legacy of
permissiveness in upbringing and laxity in schooling since post-World
War II, we should regard the growing evidence of illiteracy among the
otherwise educated elite as a misunderstood symptom of a wider and
more dangerous educational and cultural dilemma.
Consider the illiteracy of college students and graduates . They are
really not illiterate. They can read and write. They fill out complex
forms, from the IRS, the ETS, the Census Bureau, and the like, and
they function at home and at work using words and grammar
to
communicate. Their poor usage and lack of cultured speech and prose
reflect a revised and an increasingly accepted view of language and
literacy. Words and language no longer appear to be common, shared,
and liberating instruments for the individual, necessary for personal
development and power. Language and the written word have become
merely useful tools of defense and survival in society. They have
become essentially unattractive skills. Only a new kind of rudimentary
knowledge of language is needed for functioning and achieving a
stable place in the social structure. Why do college students appear not
to care to become literate in a traditional manner acceptable to the
outraged critics? The answer is that they have neither the historical
sensibility nor the autobiographical experience with the written word
or the rhetorically adept spoken word which might convince them that
achieving a high level of literacy is either more useful than a minimal
command of language or intrinsically worthwhile.
The traditional view of literacy as providing autonomy, freedom,
and power has given way to a newer notion of literacy which the young
especially have internalized. This new notion of literacy rejects the
claim that the command of complex written language will result in the
personal and political benefits explicit in the older historic call for
mass and universal literacy. The new internalized minimal definition
