Szwed begins his piece with a directed thought and promptly proceeds to derail and provide no closure to the issue he brings up. It is true, as he claims, that literacy is very difficult to measure. While it is associated with “living well” and the antithesis is associated as a root cause of poverty, it’s a given that it is more complex than simple statistics can measure. By analyzing the “sales” of an area in a literary context, we gain no sense of what is being read, only what is being bought. Yes, books are bought for decoration, social appearance, and general pretension, so we can’t measure–logically–what people are actually investing themselves in. In an education context, he states that “the everyday judgments of non-educators of what is or is not literate ability or activity is highly variable.” This much is obvious, we know that people have widely different views on what “literacy” actually means, which inhibits its general improvement.
The problem with Szwed’s commentary is that it is just that, a commentary. He brings an issue to light, an important one, no doubt. And he provides a solution… but not really. He brings up the effectiveness of ethnography but hardly clarifies exactly what ethnography even is, let alone how to implement. With vague descriptions, he asserts its exclusive efficiency but stops there. In fact he doesn’t even provide useless “solution” until the last page.
The vague nature of what we consider “literature” and “literacy” to be is a problem, there is dissent there. But why address the topic in such chaotic detail without providing an equally detailed solution? Szwed’s commentary wears the guise of pretentious profundity with no meat underneath the skin. He’s arbitrarily addressing an issue in the name of solving it, without hardly attempting to do so.
