The core intent of Wendell Berry’s work “In Defense of Literacy” is to clearly and eloquently explain the ways in which literacy is important to human society and the ways in which society has attempted to reduce the importance of literacy and the damage that has done
Wendell Berry specifically points out how the societal obsession with practicality has broken and molded the teachers and practioners of the linguistic arts into only using those arts for purposes deemed practical to society. To quote the text “By “practicality” most users of the term now mean whatever will most predictably and most quickly make a profit. Teachers of English and literature have either submitted, or are expected to submit, along with teachers of the more “practical” disciplines, to the doctrine that the purpose of education is the mass production of producers and consumers.” Berry believes that the situation of English as a field is a perversion of the original intent and believes that the societal standard of belief is “if a student will not teach his language, he has no need to master it. I find that the argument made within this passage very compelling. I think it does a good job of dissecting the societal compulsions for practicality that have damaged the field of literature/writing in lines such as the ones prior quoted and properly defending the field on it’s own original merits in lines such as “We must know a better language. We must speak, and teach our children to speak, a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it. And to do this we must know something of the roots and resources of our language; we must know its literature. The only defense against the worst is a knowledge of the best. By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters. But to appreciate fully the necessity for the best sort of literacy we must consider not just the environment of prepared language in which most of us now pass most of our lives, but also the utter transience of most of this language, which is meant to be merely glanced at, or heard only once, or read once and thrown away.” Overall, I think this is a very complete and tight argument, I don’t really have any big lingering questions regarding where the meaning of the essay should go from what is written within the work.
Were I there to ask Berry, I would ask him about the student’s perspective regarding literacy. I wonder if the student’s unwillingness to be literate could impact the argument that he made within the text, given that it primarily focuses on teachers and those above them as opposed to those being taught