Past the second watershed. Of the six balances: 1 lost, 2 tipping, 3 not assessed. Position at least 80 of 100. The balances not assessed can only move it further.
- Biological degradation Not assessed Does this tool damage the living world, or the body, faster than either can recover? Not assessed: nobody has looked at this yet, so it is not counted as holding.
- Radical monopoly Tipping Can people still meet the need another way, without this tool? Tipping: the tool has begun to cause this problem, without going past the limit.
- Overprogramming Tipping Does using this tool require training or certification that people cannot give each other? Tipping: the tool has begun to cause this problem, without going past the limit.
- Polarization Lost Does this tool move power or advantage to a few, at others’ cost? Lost: the tool is clearly past the limit.
- Obsolescence Not assessed Does this tool force people to replace what still works? Not assessed: nobody has looked at this yet, so it is not counted as holding.
- Frustration Not assessed Does this tool give back less than it takes, counting everything it takes? Not assessed: nobody has looked at this yet, so it is not counted as holding.
What it does
Teaches a whole population to read and write one standard language, fixed by rule, certified by schools, and required by offices.
Where it stops
It has no limit by design. A single literacy is imposed as the ruler’s language, as a credential only schooling can issue, and as the only knowledge that counts.
How easily you can stop using it
You cannot unlearn reading. In the developed world the standard is the cultural default, assumed in every form, contract, and sign, and most people cannot live outside it. It is not an absolute monopoly: there is an outside, and people do opt out, into unschooling and other alternatives.
What is scored
- The unit: One standard written language, taught by schools and required by the state and its offices. Left out: reading and writing people pick up for their own uses (see Vernacular literacy), the bound book (see The book), and the school itself (see Compulsory schooling), though the three overlap.
- The job it is tested against: Making a population able to read and write the standard. UNESCO’s figures say it largely does.
- Where and when: Europe and its colonies from 1492 to the present, with Canada as the recent case. The evidence is historical argument and one current UNESCO count.
This record is about imposed literacy: one standard of reading and writing, taught by schools and required by the state. Reading and writing picked up for people’s own uses has its own record, Vernacular literacy. The object that has carried most reading, the bound book, has its own record: The book. Ivan Illich loved the book. Of literacy he took a harder view: he thought it had changed everyone, including people who never learned to read. And for most of its history literacy has been carried by conquest: it has largely been a tool that empires and colonial states used to rule people, not one those people chose.
An old complaint
The first tool review of writing on record is hostile. In Plato’s Phaedrus (274c–275b), Socrates tells of the Egyptian god Theuth, who offers writing to King Thamus as a recipe for memory and wisdom. The king answers that it will do the opposite: people will stop exercising their memories, and they will seem to know much while understanding little. The same complaint has been made about every writing tool since. It is also the test this catalogue applies. Does the tool make people more capable, or more dependent?
Writing changes the people who use it
Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, who had been his student, argued that the honest answer is neither. Writing does not simply add a skill or take one away. It changes how people think. McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) claimed that the printed book, with its identical and repeatable pages, trained readers to see the world as uniform, sequential, and separate from themselves, and that individualism and nationalism both grew from that training. His next book, Understanding Media (1964), put the general point in the title of its first chapter, “The Medium Is the Message”: a tool’s largest effects come from its form, not from what it carries.
Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) is the more careful account. In a culture without writing, he argued, knowledge has to be kept in memory, so it is held in formulas, stories, and repetition, and it stays close to the situations where it is used. Writing lets words sit still. Once they do, people can compare them, list them, analyse them, and think about thinking. Ong called writing a technology and titled his central chapter “Writing Restructures Consciousness.” He also named what he saw coming next: a secondary orality of telephone, radio, and television, which sounds like speech but depends on writing and print to exist.
Illich accepted much of this but moved the turning point back, from the printing press to a change in the layout of the page around 1150. That argument, from In the Vineyard of the Text, is in the record for The book.
Literacy without reading
ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), which Illich wrote with the medievalist Barry Sanders, makes a wider claim. Literacy is not only a skill that some people have. It is a way of thinking that spreads to people who cannot read at all. Illich called this lay literacy.
Much of their evidence comes from M. T. Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record, a history of England between 1066 and 1307. At the start of that period a claim to land was proved by living witnesses and by objects handed over in public. By the end it was proved by a charter, and people who could not read one still kept, trusted, and feared written records. Illich and Sanders argue that the same shift reached inward. Memory came to be imagined as a store of records. The self became a story a person could tell and examine. A lie became a departure from a fixed account. None of these is natural, they argue; each depends on the written text as its model.
The book’s last part turns to the present. Illich and Sanders argue that the literate mind is being replaced by one modelled on the computer, in which language is treated as information to be processed and exchanged. They compare the result to Orwell’s Newspeak.
How literacy gets schooled
Literacy passes its second watershed when people come to believe that reading must be taught, and that only an institution can teach it. Illich traced the idea to 1492. In “Vernacular Values,” an essay in Shadow Work (1981), he describes how Antonio de Nebrija dedicated to Queen Isabella a grammar of Castilian, the first printed grammar of a European vernacular. Nebrija’s argument was that the people’s speech was unruly, and that a language fixed by rules and taught by the Crown’s scholars would serve the state. He also complained that printing had let people read whatever they liked, outside anyone’s supervision. Illich read this as the beginning of the taught mother tongue: everyday speech turned into a subject that professionals must hand out.
In Deschooling Society (1971) he made the practical case. Most people who read well, he argued, learned it outside the classroom or in spite of it. He cited the Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire, who found that an adult can begin to read in about forty hours when the first words are ones that matter in that person’s political life. Where literacy is treated as something only a school can issue, the people who did not get it there are labelled illiterate, and the label does its own harm. See Compulsory schooling.
Vernacular and imposed
Illich separated two things that the word literacy runs together. One is vernacular: reading and writing picked up in the course of living, in the tongues people already speak, for uses of their own. The other is the taught standard: one language, fixed by rule, issued by a school and required by an office. His essay “Vernacular Values” is about that difference, and this record is about the second kind. The first has its own record.
He knew the first kind from the inside. Illich grew up among several languages and, by his own account, had no mother tongue. In the essay he describes a world, common before the nation-state and still common outside it, in which most people speak several tongues without having been taught any of them, and a household, a market, and a church may each use a different one.
This raises a question the catalogue cannot yet answer, even with two records. A society of many overlapping literacies, each tied to a place and a use, may bear the costs of literacy differently from one administered in a single standard language: spread more thinly, and harder to turn into a tool of rule. It is listed with the open questions below.
A companion of empire
Nebrija said plainly what his grammar was for. In its prologue he told the queen that language has always been the companion of empire, and that the peoples Castile conquered would have to receive its laws, and with them its language. He wrote in 1492, the year Columbus sailed. Illich took the timing seriously: the first plan to teach a people their own language was also a plan for governing other peoples.
The record since then bears Nebrija out. Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) shows how Spanish colonizers in the Americas treated alphabetic writing and the bound book as the only real writing and the only real book. Peoples who kept knowledge in other ways, including painted books and knotted cords, were classed as peoples without letters, and so without history or law. In 1562 the Franciscan Diego de Landa had Maya books burned in Yucatán. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss went further. In “A Writing Lesson,” a chapter of Tristes Tropiques (1955), he argued that the first use of writing everywhere was to count, tax, and command people, and that its use for learning came later and second.
Canada is a recent case. For more than a century the residential school system took Indigenous children from their families to be taught in English or French, and punished them for speaking their own languages. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that this amounted to cultural genocide. Treaties are a second case: Crown officials wrote down in English agreements that Indigenous signatories had negotiated and understood by speech, and the written version was long treated as the whole agreement.
Literacy has also been taken up by the people it was used against. Sequoyah devised a script for Cherokee by about 1821, and the Cherokee Nation was printing a newspaper in it by 1828. Slaveholding states in the American South made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read, which shows what rulers thought reading could do in other hands. Freire’s method belongs here too. But these are cases of people seizing the tool or building their own. They do not change how literacy mostly arrived.
How much it is used
UNESCO reports that 88% of adults worldwide can read and write. It counts at least 739 million adults who cannot, two thirds of them women (figures as published in August 2026). These numbers count a basic skill. They do not show how many people read books, or how well.
The six balances
Scored as set out in How we evaluate tools. Imposed literacy does make most people able to read and write the standard, so the scoring starts from the six balances. Three of the six are assessed: radical monopoly, overprogramming, and polarization.
- Biological degradation: Not assessed. Two kinds of harm belong here, and each now has a source, but neither can yet be laid at this record’s door. To the body: a study of 67,798 people in Britain found that each extra year of education causes more short-sightedness (Mountjoy and others). That is evidence about schooling, which has its own record. To what people know of the living world: across North America, northwest Amazonia, and New Guinea, over 75% of recorded uses of medicinal plants are known in only one language, most of them threatened (Cámara-Leret and Bascompte). That an imposed written standard is what ends those languages is not yet sourced. The materials literacy is practised on are scored with the tools that carry it.
- Radical monopoly: 1. In a literate society, forms, contracts, signs, and laws all assume reading, and Clanchy shows written records displacing memory and witness as proof. But speech, apprenticeship, and memory still carry much of what people know. In the developed world the standard is the cultural default, and most people cannot live outside it. It is not an absolute monopoly all the same: there is an outside, and people do opt out, into unschooling and other alternatives. That is why this balance is tipping and not lost.
- Overprogramming: 1. Since Nebrija, reading has been tied to teaching, and schools now claim the right to certify it, though Freire’s and Illich’s evidence is that people can learn it without them.
- Polarization: 2. Literacy has largely served the powerful. States and empires used it to count, tax, and command, to class peoples without writing as lawless, and to replace their languages. UNESCO still counts 739 million adults on the wrong side of the line, two thirds of them women.
- Obsolescence: Not assessed. The skill does not expire, which is scored under Vernacular literacy. Whether the standard and its credentials are made to expire is not yet looked at.
- Frustration: Not assessed. What a person pays to be certified in the standard, against what it returns, is not yet looked at.
Where the threshold falls
Past the second watershed, at 80. Polarization scores 2, and any balance at 2 puts a tool past the limit: 70, plus 2.5 for each of the four points in its total. Three balances are not assessed, so this is the lowest the position can be. The book is a different tool and sits inside the convivial range. Vernacular literacy sits at the centre of it. Literacy as it has mostly been spread is required, certified, in the ruler’s language, and used to govern the people it was given to.
Illich did not want to undo literacy, and this record does not argue for that. He wanted bookish reading kept as a practice that people choose and share, in what he called houses of reading, and not as a credential. The distance between that and the history above is the reason for the score.
Open questions
- How should this record relate to Compulsory schooling? Imposed literacy is what puts it past the second watershed, and schooling is how it is imposed. The two may be one system with two records.
- The six balances record how far a tool has gone, not who bears the cost. Imposed literacy’s costs have fallen on the peoples it was imposed on. How should a record show that?
- Biological degradation has two sourced candidates and no score. Find evidence, language by language, that an imposed written standard is what ended them, and decide whether short-sightedness belongs here or to schooling.
- Radical monopoly is scored tipping, on the editor’s judgment that the standard is the default in the developed world but leaves an outside. How many people live outside it, where, and at what cost? Colonial schooling set out to end spoken ways of keeping law and history; where it succeeded, this balance was lost for those peoples.
- Does literacy in a people’s own language, on their own terms, score differently? Catalogue a case, such as the Cherokee syllabary.
- Add sources for Sequoyah’s syllabary, the laws against teaching enslaved people to read, and the written and spoken versions of the treaties.
- Add Canadian literacy data, and a measure of functional literacy alongside the basic skill UNESCO counts.
- Add page references for the claims taken from ABC, Shadow Work, Ong, McLuhan, Mignolo, and Lévi-Strauss, checked against the printed editions.
Sources
- Cámara-Leret, Rodrigo, and Jordi Bascompte. “Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 24 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103683118.
- Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307. London: Edward Arnold, 1979.
- Illich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.
- Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
- Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
- Illich, Ivan. Shadow Work. Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981.
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Atheneum, 1974.
- McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
- McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
- Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
- Mountjoy, Edward, Neil M. Davies, Denis Plotnikov, et al. “Education and myopia: assessing the direction of causality by mendelian randomisation.” BMJ 361 (2018): k2022. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k2022.
- Nebrija, Antonio de. Gramática de la lengua castellana. Salamanca, 1492.
- Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
- Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995.
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015.
- UNESCO. “What you need to know about literacy.” August 20, 2026. https://www.unesco.org/en/literacy/need-know.