Nowadays, Even the Illiterates Read and Write David C. Berliner Arizona State University The great Italian novelist, Alberto Moravia, is said to have remarked in dismay that in these times even the illiterates read and write. He was probably referring to his critics, of course, but his observation is perfectly correct. The history of literacy in the West is one of increased expectations and increased performance. Once expectations for high levels of literacy were held for only a small elite of the citizenry. After the Reformation expectations were held for all of society to achieve modest levels of lit- eracy. Now we seek the previously unimaginable goal of high levels of critical literacy for all of our society (Calfee & Patrick, 1996; Resnick & Resnick, 1977). This is a worthy goal, no doubt, but perhaps one that fails to recognize the enormity of individual differences and the envi- ronmental consequences in our society of widespread poverty and large numbers of mentally undemanding jobs. So we have upped the standards by which we judge literacy, and against these newer standards - the highest the world has ever tried to reach for the general population - some find the U.S. public schools to be deficient. I am not of this group. I have argued repeatedly that too much is made of the alleged deficiencies of American public schools, while the genuine achievements of that system for most Americans are really quite remarkable (Berliner & Biddle, 1995). To me the data suggest that the U.S. public schools have done a good job of producing large numbers of literate Americans should that level of literacy be needed in their lives. Test makers and test interpreters often seem to confuse typical with maximum literacy performance. The typical performance is found in one's daily encounters with written communication and with the tested ver- sions of literacy that are divorced from the lives of the people being tested. Maximum literacy performance is what would be obtained were people motivated to perform to the best of their abilities in situations about which they have some background and familiarity. This distinction between typical performance and maximum performance in literacy tasks will be needed to interpret some of the literature associated with 344 Research In the Teaching of English, Vol. 30, No. 3, October 1996 This content downloaded from 129.219.247.33 on Thu, 17 Dec 2020 21:18:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms