Moving Beyond the Reading Wars

My concept of enlightened literacy is drawn from the historical era of the Enlightenment. Historian Jonathan Israel provides me with a definition of the Enlightenment that informs my concept of its application to literacy. As Israel explains,

“Enlightenment is, hence, best characterized as the quest for human amelioration occurring between 1680 and 1800, driven principally by ‘philosophy’, that is, what we would term philosophy, science, and political and social science including the new science of economics lumped together, leading to revolutions in ideas and attitudes first, and actual practical revolutions second, or else the other way around, both sets of revolutions seeking universal recipes for mankind and, ultimately, in its radical manifestation, laying the foundations for modern basic human rights and freedom and representative democracy.”

            Israel’s definition is particularly suitable in that it begins with the overarching idea of human amelioration, or the process of making conditions better for humankind. Additionally, his description of enlightenment defines philosophy as an amalgam of what and how we think about science, including the social sciences, and beliefs about how we should live together and care for each other in an increasingly complex world. Enlightenment requires the desire and ability to work concordantly to seek revolutionary, or new, ideas that inform ways to uplift human rights, freedom, and democracy. This is the enlightenment ideal that Thomas Jefferson espoused as one of the founding fathers of the United States. As Clarence Karier stated, Jefferson’s “Enlightenment faith in an empirical science, human reason, freedom of inquiry, and the progress of humanity” were expressed in his vision for our new nation in which education would play an essential role.

            As a teacher, my conception of enlightened literacy is also substantively informed by Emmanuel Kant, one of the many philosophers of the Enlightenment and a person who understood the importance of education in the lives of people. Kant conceived of enlightenment as the freedom to engage in a process that creates independent and critical thinkers set free from those (guardians) seeking to limit and control the thoughts of others in order to achieve and maintain their self-interest. Thus, for me, enlightened literacy is conceptualized as an educational process and an epistemological journey that gives students the freedom and opportunity to broaden their educational horizons, and not limit those horizons.

            Based on Israel’s definition of enlightenment, Jefferson’s application of enlightenment ideas and education to the United States, and the essentiality of freedom in the enlightenment process as espoused by Kant, I envision enlightened literacy as the employment of literacy in all its various forms and modalities, informed by philosophy, science, social science disciplines, and the humanities to promote hope for the improvement of the human condition, democracy, and global citizenship. I believe that if the period of time called the Enlightenment can most broadly and accurately be described, it would be a period when thinking in different areas of intellectual thought and human endeavors found fertile cultural and social ground. But even then, like now, impediments like book censorship, stood in the way of achieving enlightenment ideals.It was, therefore, not a time that can be accurately defined employing simplistic ideological or intellectual reductionist thought. It was a complex period when all areas of intellectual and ideological thought began to interact within society as knowledge increased. It is this Enlightenment that forms my definition of enlightened literacy.

Selected Resources:

Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? Translated by Ted Humphrey. Hackett Publishing, 1784. https://nypl.org/sites/default/files/kant_whatisenlightenment.pdf.

Clarence J. Karier, The Individual, Society, and Education: A History of American Educational Ideas, (University of Illinois Press, 1986).

G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Pedagogy: Toward Education for Freedom. Topics in Historical Philosophy. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012).

Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790. (New York: Harper, 2021), 31-31; 779.

By Deborah Duncan Owens