In the convivial range. Of the six balances: 4 holding, 2 not assessed. Position somewhere between 50 and 80 of 100. The balances not assessed could put it past the second watershed.
- Biological degradation Not assessed
- Radical monopoly Holds
- Overprogramming Holds
- Polarization Not assessed
- Obsolescence Holds
- Frustration Holds
What it does
Lets people keep words outside memory: write them down, send them across distance and time, and read what others have written, in the tongues they already speak and for uses of their own.
Where it stops
At the use. It is picked up in the course of living, for a letter, an account, a prayer, or a notice, and carries no certificate. It stops being vernacular when one standard is fixed by rule and required.
How easily you can stop using it
You cannot unlearn reading, but nothing here compels it. On Illich’s account, speech, memory, and witness go on doing the same work beside it.
This record is about reading and writing as people pick them up and use them for their own ends, in the tongues they already speak. The other kind, one standard taught by schools and required by the state, has its own record: Imposed literacy. The two were one record until October 2026. They were split because the benefits were being credited to the skill and the harms to the regime, under a single position.
What is scored
- The unit: Reading and writing learned in the course of living and used for a person’s or a community’s own purposes. Left out: schooling, credentials, and a state’s standard language (see Imposed literacy), and the paper, books, and screens it is practised on (see The book).
- The job it is tested against: Keeping words outside memory and passing them across distance and time. It does this reliably.
- Where and when: This is a reading of Illich, Ong, and the cases Illich cites, not a survey. It has not been checked against the history of any one language or people.
What Illich meant by vernacular
In “Vernacular Values” (1980) Illich took the word from ancient Rome, where, he wrote, it named anything “homebred, homemade, derived from the commons,” as opposed to what was bought and sold. A vernacular tongue is one absorbed from the people around you. 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. The research note No mother tongue follows that argument.
Reading and writing can be held the same way. A person learns enough to keep an account, write a letter, follow a prayer, or read a notice, and nobody certifies it.
Learned without a school
In Deschooling Society (1971) Illich argued that most people who read well 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.
It still changes people
This is not a harmless kind of literacy set against a harmful one. Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) argues that writing restructures how people think, whoever teaches it and for whatever purpose: words that sit still can be compared, listed, and analysed. Illich and Barry Sanders made a similar argument in ABC (1988). Vernacular literacy changes its users too. What it lacks is the compulsion and the certificate.
The six balances
Scored as set out in How we evaluate tools. Four of the six balances are assessed, mostly on Illich’s account.
- Biological degradation: Not assessed. The skill itself consumes nothing; the materials it is practised on are scored with the tools that carry it.
- Radical monopoly: 0. On Illich’s account, vernacular reading and writing sit beside speech, memory, and witness and do not replace them. This rests on his essay and needs historical cases.
- Overprogramming: 0. It is learned without a programme. Freire’s forty hours, as Illich reports them, are the evidence here.
- Polarization: Not assessed. Reading and writing held by a few, such as a scribal class or one sex, can divide a community without any state behind it.
- Obsolescence: 0. The skill does not expire. Someone who learned to read fifty years ago can read today’s page, and nothing forces an upgrade.
- Frustration: 0. Learning to read costs time. The return lasts a lifetime and is not used up by use.
Where the threshold falls
In the convivial range, at 50, the centre: the four balances assessed all hold. Two are not assessed, so this is the lowest the position can be, and the record is provisional.
Open questions
- Is a skill a tool at all? Illich used the word broadly, but an outside review of the method questioned scoring a capability on the same scale as a bicycle.
- Assess polarization. Where reading and writing were kept by a few without a state’s backing, what did that do?
- Catalogue a case of a people taking up writing on their own terms, such as the Cherokee syllabary, with sources.
- Is “vernacular literacy” a real category in the history of reading, or Illich’s ideal? Find what historians of literacy say.
- Add page references for the claims taken from Deschooling Society, Shadow Work, ABC, and Ong.
Sources
- Illich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. North Point Press, 1988.
- Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. Harper & Row, 1971.
- Illich, Ivan. Shadow Work. Marion Boyars, 1981.
- Illich, Ivan. “Vernacular Values.” CoEvolution Quarterly, 1980. https://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1980_vernacular_values.html.
- Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen, 1982.