World Three

IF WE discuss in terms of the total content of the world's cultural heritage including literacy and social traditions and conventions, etc., we will notice that the non-literate societies transmit them through direct imitation of the elders by the young ones. But there are lots of problems in it. The most significant of those is that the transmission through speech is very much susceptible to changes and errors and it cannot be preserved accurately for a long period of time. For example, in order to recite the Vedas correctly the pratishakhyas were created; but even then they can be heard with strong regional characteristics in different parts of India.

Because of its changing nature, the spoken language gets low priority in comparison with the written language from the legal point of view because law attaches precedence and weight to written forms. A simple example here will drive home the point. The law is not at all concerned as to how a person pronounces his/her name, but if there is a change in its spelling objections are raised. For these reasons, writing is considered public and official when speech is not. This is why J. Goody and I. Watt have remarked that ``... the most significant elements of any human culture are channelled through words...'' Here, of course, it is necessary to discuss how children's knowledge of the concept `word' is not a fixed one and on the contrary, it evolves over a period of time and gets crystallised as a result of learning to read and write. A number of scholars have demonstrated it in their research reports.

Visual strategies

L. S. Vygotsky has made a distinction between everyday concepts which are acquired spontaneously and in an unconscious and unsystematic manner and the scientific concepts which are a result of literacy. Using this distinction, the German scholars F. Januschek, W. Paprotte and W. Rhode have argued that pre- school children understand the meaning of `word' in its everyday sense. Not only that, they have shown that kindergarten children refer to attributes of the detonated objects when asked to say why certain words are long or short. For example, Schrien `crying', according to those children, is a short word as `Children are not allowed to cry for a long time'. After a detailed discussion of many such cases, Januschek et al. (ibid.) have suggested that formal teaching of reading and writing transforms and restricts the broad functional core of the concept of `word' in school-going children and literate people are predominantly oriented to visual strategies.

Chronological priority

Keeping such cases in view, Michael Stubbs has stated that though there is chronological priority for the spoken language, the written language has social priority. It is reflected in the opinion of the literate societies all over the world that it is the written language which is authentic and the spoken language is a corrupt variety of that. Again, Stubbs has made it clear that ``... in education it is often people's beliefs, perceptions, attitudes and prejudices which are crucial, however false they may be on objective grounds.'' That's why D. P. Pattanayak says that ``In the popular mind writing is endowed with magical power. This has led to the belief that script is the soul of a language.'' The literate people command respect everywhere because they can read and write which lead them to think more objectively and critically analyse everything. There is an old Sanskrit saying which states it clearly: A king is worshipped in his own country; but a learned man is worshipped everywhere.

In another experiment, J. Downing, L. Ollila and P. Oliver have compared Indian children with non-Indian children in kindergarten classes in Canada. They have used the Technical Language of Literacy Test that investigates the concepts like `letter', `sentence', etc. which belong to the written language. The subjects of this experiment were asked to circle the item chosen by the experimenter and it was found that the Indian children were immature with reference to their development of featural concepts in comparison with the non-Indian group.

The same researchers conducted another test involving 787 kindergarteners from different schools in a western Canadian city that revealed a strong bond between the level of understanding of such feature concepts and socio-economic class. It showed that children coming from the higher socio-economic level performed better than those belonging to the lower socio-economic level. Both these tests clearly indicate that due to pre-school exposure of the non-Indian and higher socio-economic group children to reading and writing skills they had better cognitive advantages and these helped them to perform better than others.

Since we are discussing cognitive advantages, it must be pointed out here that those people who know to read and write possess new intellectual resources which facilitate thoughts in a big way. It is not our purpose here to underestimate the intellectual achievements of pre- and non-literate peoples; but we want to emphasise that literacy skills have brought about a sea change on this scene.

`Wandering encyclopaedias'

Because of the acquisition of literacy skills, exact records of various discoveries, inventions, and epoch making events, etc., could be kept and were handed over from one generation to another in an unchanged form whereas due to social amnesia in the pre- literate period people had to begin either from the scratch every time or from whatever they could acquire from the ascending generation. Thus, just at one stroke writing could overcome the limitations the pre-literate societies had to live with and it led to the birth of history, science and mathematics in the true sense of the terms. For this reason Friedrich W. Nietzsche has termed the modern people of the literate society as ``wandering encyclopaedias''.

Karl Popper has proposed the theory of World Three while referring to written language in particular. He has used the term World One for the objective world that consists of material things and World Two for the subjective world that consists of mental states and consciousness. According to him, World Three consists of objective knowledge which is nothing but that which exists independently of the subjective experience of a person in books and libraries.

So he has argued that it is written language that fosters a critical attitude towards various statements and theories inherited from the earlier generations. In his own words he says, ``Instead of growing better memories and brains, we grow paper, pens, pencils, typewriters, dictaphones, the printing press and libraries''. Similarly, J. Goody and I. Watt while citing the example of the Greek world state that the non-literate people not only fail to notice the inconsistencies in their traditions, customs and beliefs, but also either adjust or forget them.

PANCHANAN MOHANTY

Professor, the Centre for Applied

Linguistics & Translation Studies,

University of Hyderabad.

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