For some unknown reason, while at work yesterday, a memory of an old episode of Gunsmoke (I think — it suppose it could have been any of those old westerns) popped into my head.
The episode in question centered around a widowed (or possibly divorced) man and his son. The man was illiterate, and by God, so would his son be if Dad had anything to say about it. The father was violently opposed to his son learning to read, to the point that he would administer vicious whippings if he caught his son with a book, and going so far as to threaten the life of the local schoolteacher (he may have physically assaulted her/him, too, I can’t recall) for attempting to teach his son.
My question is this: Is such an attitude realistic (i.e. would there really be people who would think that way, that knowing how to read is a bad thing)? And if realistic, what in the world could lead to somebody so violently holding such an attitude?
I see this as being somewhat different from, say, radical Islamists believing that girls and women don’t need to be educated. As depicted in the TV episode, it really seemed to be more a matter of “being illiterate is good enough for me, so it’s good enough for my son”. It was almost like it was either a matter of “pride”, or else the father had been so badly “done wrong” by a literate person that he became fanatically anti-literate.
Perhaps someone brought up by a very authoritarian father would want to exercise that same level of authority over their offspring, feeling that was the natural order of things and their right. Having a son who could read would definitely undermine that authority.
It’s not likely that anti-literacy would be a widespread organized phenomenon* but one can easily enough find individuals or groups which also engage in insecure overcompensation or bitter/selfish/unreflective If-it-was-like-that-for-me-it’ll-be-like-that-for-the-next-generation along those same lines. Deaf culture is a prominent example.
*Literacy is really great for transmitting ideas and organizing actions.
An extremely conservative pre-literacy outlook might consider “book learnin’” to be at best irrelevant to a life of farming, ranching, and craft labor. At worst, as a self-absorbed decadence like we would now consider someone who stays in college until the age of 28 and graduates with a PhD in aesthetics.
“Gawd Awmighty boy! When’r you gonna git out in th’ world an do sumthin’ for REAL, like git a job?!?”
Say what? I was sign language interpreter for 15 years. I don’t think you know anything about Deaf culture if you would say something like this. Deaf adults are constantly advocating for Deaf children, and definitely don’t want them to suffer the same things they themselves went through.
RE: The OP. I think this would apply specifically to reading books, as opposed to other kinds of knowledge. There have been religions that opposed reading books on the grounds that they are “lies,” and not in the sense that they are malicious, but because they contain made-up stories, well, that says it all: they are made-up. Those are lies. Because of the nature of TV and the desire not to offend people, the story may have left religion out of the story, but to the extent that the man’s belief was based of real doctrine of the time, that was it. I think an extremist branch of JWs that believed this, although there were probably others, some which do not exist in any form now, and I don’t think you find this in any JW group now.
Aside from religious fanatics, I can certainly see this being a facet of a mental illness. Someone with schizophrenia could see reading as a government mind-control plot, while someone with OCD could be obsessed with a perceived evil associated with it, or simply want to avoid it as a compulsion, the way they randomly avoid sitting in the back seats of cars, or being in groups of people with odd numbers.
Self-conscious “Deaf Culture” was created as a reaction to the Oralist school of thought imposed in schools for the deaf all over this country up until a few decades ago. Combine punishing children for signing, the linguistic isolation created by the physical fact of not being able to hear spoken words, and widespread boarding schools which meant that deaf kids were isolated from their own families, and there you have the recipe for Deaf Culture.
“By contrast, those who identify with the Deaf culture movement typically reject the label impaired and other labels that imply that deafness is a pathological condition,[18] viewing it instead as a focus of pride.”
“Deafness is not generally considered a condition that needs to be fixed.”
“Within the Deaf community, there is strong opposition to the use of cochlear implants and sometimes also hearing aids[citation needed] and similar technologies. This is often justified in terms of a rejection of the view that deafness, as a condition, is something that needs to be fixed.”
“Certain leaders of the Deaf community are attempting to generate opposition to cochlear implants in children by pitting the rights of deaf children and their families against the needs of deaf society. They have labeled physicians as unethical and CIs as “child abuse,””
“they maintain both that cochlear implants do not work and that they work so well that they are “genocidal””
It is not unknown for immigrant men (mainly from the more backward parts of the Subcontinent) to deliberately keep their women ignorant and illiterate so as to control them. It doesn’t really work with their children as education is compulsory, although there have been reports of them sending girls back to their country of origin to get around this.
You and your wikipedia cites are wrong. Are there some deaf adults who are down on cochlear implants? Yeah, there are a few, and especially so 20 years ago when they were brand new. Note your last cite was from 1995. 20 years ago this was absolutely experimental surgery on the brains of little kids. That’s scary.
Why would someone believe that deafness isn’t a condition that needs to be fixed? That’s because in actual fact in most cases it can’t be fixed, if by fixed you mean “Give a person normal hearing”.
The problem here is that the vast majority of deaf kids have hearing parents who don’t know anything about deafness. And so of course they want to fix their deaf child, and a cochlear implant looks like the solution. No more deafness! But of course it usually doesn’t work that way. Your child is still deaf. And you aren’t interested in hearing the perspective of deaf adults, because what would they know about deafness?
A few people 20 years ago who were extremely skeptical about cochlear implants is completely different than what we’re talking about.
Opposing education (and education greatly relys on reading) is a common way to keep people subjugated to authority.
Many parents believe that allowing their kids to read anything not approved by them could result in the children questioning their authority. Thus homeschooling or religious schools.
Pre Civil War, many southern US states had laws that made it illegal to teach a black person to read. (Post Civil War, this was done by defunding the educational system.)
TV scripts of the 1950s were often injected with heavy doses of metaphor, which are pretty much meaningless to us today.* A father who didn’t want his son to read could have meant white Southerners who didn’t want black people advancing, or parents who thought their daughters shouldn’t go to college. Or maybe the struggle between the father and the schoolteacher was supposed to represent something, and the fight over reading was just an issue invented to generate a conflict.
Did you know the movie High Noon was supposed to be an allegory about McCarthyism? Although, as many critics have noted, it could also be interpreted to be anti-Nazi.
Actually, it sounds like a Bonanza episode I remember seeing. Hoss was instrumental in mentoring the kid, who supposedly went on to make the first attempts to measure the speed of light.
Dad got won over as a farmer when he was shown how ‘scientific farming’ could improve his crops and keep his fields from playing out and forcing him to move yet again.
I knew a guy who didn’t want to teach his kid how to read, because everything would be done by voice and voice-recognition in “the future” and there wouldn’t be any need to read books any more.
His wife overruled him, and the kid just graduated from college.
There was a Little House on the Prairie episode where Mary (I think-- it might have been Laura, but I think it was Mary) went to be a teacher in some backwoods town, even more backwoods than the one where they lived, and some woman there who ran the town like a cult was against the children learning anything. “Ciphering” (arithmetic) and enough reading to read a bible was all a farmer needed to know. She carried a bible everywhere, and quoted from it a lot, but Mary caught her misquoting it, and asked her if she could actually read herself, or had just memorized some passages.
For some reason, exposing the woman as a fraud made the townspeople decide to trust Mary, and let her educate their children.
I wasn’t a regular viewer of the show-- I watched this with a friend, or something, so I don’t know if this was a prelude to putting Mary on a bus because the actress wanted off the show, or what happened next, but at some point she was back, because she had to get scarlet fever and go blind, in keeping with the books.
Anyway, back when public education was becoming a thing, which happened county by county, and then state by state, before there were federal programs to support it, there probably were naysayers, so even though I’m sure there was a lot of hyperbole for effect on these TV shows (and much too neat resolution), this was probably something that actually happened. It was probably the anti-vax movement of its time.