Literacy Is Power

I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. — Neo | The Matrix I recently read a provocative article, “The digital age’s reversion to pre-literate communication,” that concludes human intellectualism will be displaced by artificial general intelligence (AGI). The author, Andrey Mir, proposes that with each new literacy medium, from orality to writing, the Internet, social media, and now generative AI, we gain “new

A growing body of research on automated technologies has begun to consider the implications they have for… activities often understood as deeply, irrevocably, and centrally human, activities like writing. — Bradley Robinson | "Speculative Propositions for Digital Writing under the New Autonomous Model of Literacy," p. 127 Literacy is recognized broadly as an essential human activity. Through literacy, we grow as humans in search of personal and social meanings, and through t

...what fiction—and by this I mean not only the novel but also the epic and myth—makes possible is to approach the world in a subjunctive mode, to conceive of it as if it were other than it is: in short, the great, irreplaceable possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis... to envision what it [the future] might be.   — Amitav Ghosh | The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable , 128-

The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.  — bell hooks | Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom , 207 In a recent post, “