I do have experience, growing up an Evangelical Christian, of my mom and certain adults within the church believing I shouldn’t read certain kinds of books, mainly science fiction (it “promotes” secular humanism) and fantasy (it “promotes” witchcraft/magic). But there wasn’t any general anti-reading sentiment. The closest thing I’ve personally encountered was an older housemate (I was in my 40s, he was in his 60s) who read nothing but the Bible, biographies, and self-help books, i.e. all “true” stuff. He once explained that he didn’t read fiction because he was completely bored by “descriptions of the landscape”; he seemed to think stories should be pure, straightforward narrative, simply describing things as they happen. He was extremely “concerned” by my love of science fiction and fantasy, and even objected to my comic books because the covers sometimes had “disturbing” images. To his credit, he did mellow a bit once I explained one of the benefits of SF/fantasy: Often, these stories address modern, real-world issues by placing them in the future or past, in a fictional setting. The fictional past/present setting allows the issues, stripped of hot-button specifics and personalities, to be presented with a bit of neutrality.
That roommate did have a bit of the “fiction is lies” attitude, but we fortunately attended the same church and our pastor was an enthusiastic fan of Tolkein and Lewis and he pointed out more than once, in his sermons, that Jesus’ own parables were fictional stories. Was Jesus a liar?
All that said, I’ve never personally encountered an anti-literacy Christian sect. The closest I’ve seen has been the medieval Roman church’s resistance to the translation of Scripture into the vernacular. I have heard accusations that the real reason for their objection was that they wanted the lay people to just accept what the Church decreed, and they feared that if the laity could read the Scriptures for themselves they might discover that the Church was just “making shit up”. That’s not to say that such sects don’t/have not existed. I don’t recall this TV episode depicting any religious reasoning behind the father’s actions, but again, it’s an episode I watched more than 30 years ago.
It could have been Bonanza, and I considered it, because that is the other western I remember watching regularly when I was a kid (my family also watched Maverick, but this doesn’t seem like the kind of story that show would have done). I went with Gunsmoke because I seem to remember a lawman being one of the primary characters in the story. But I’m open to it being a Bonanza story. I do vaguely recall there being a group of men confronting the abusive father, and an adult male character sheltering the kid.
Another factor: for the very poor who made a living with physical labor, reading and schooling might have been seen as a young boy “wasting time” that he could spend by getting a job and making some money. When laborers’ jobs didn’t require literacy why add that skill?
Remember, there was a time when it was common for 12 year olds to work in factories and coal mines.
Even today, we draw a distinction between “book smart” and “street smart.” A lot of people 100+ years ago did much the same thing. But for them, the equivalent of “street smart” meant the ability to survive.
As to the OP Socrates argued against the acquisition of literacy.
He believed that because the printed word seems permanent readers believe that they have acquired knowledge but haven’t really discovered it. Socrates felt that one had to analyze and internalize knowledge personally to acquire wisdom and virtue.
To Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and literacy hinders that.
Wonder how Socrates, or the father from the OP, would like smartphones?
But would that lead to such violent opposition to learning to read? Or was the dad’s opposition rooted more in “people who can read think they’re better than me”?
That’s a good question. Growing up as a kid in the 1970s, I watched whatever my parents watched … and then the family TV broke in 1976, when I was 10 years old. My parents elected to neither repair nor replace it, so I pretty much didn’t regularly watch TV again until I was in my mid-20s in the 1990s. And then various life circumstances led to another long break in regular viewership until Netflix started streaming TV shows. So I have these vague memories of crap I watched in the 1970s …
But I don’t specifically recall watching The Rifleman.
Holding to a belief system that is passed down from leaders to followers, or parents to children. A way I’ve seen it explained:
Belief systems tend to be passed along either vertically (parent to child, preacher to faithful), or laterally between outsiders/strangers (schools, proselytization). People who pass along their beliefs vertically are more likely to oppose literacy because outside influences endanger that system. People that transmit their beliefs laterally are more likely to support literacy as it allows them to transmit those beliefs more effectively.
Therefore for example Communists tended to be very big on literacy, as Communism was primarily transmitted laterally, adult-to-adult. Whereas “traditionalists” of various kinds are hostile or disinterested in literacy as their beliefs are transmitting vertically, and usually orally.
Another historical reason for opposing literacy was the defense of slavery in pre-Civil War South. The slavers strongly opposed letting slaves read or learn to read, since they didn’t want the slaves to have access to information they didn’t control.
When I was a college professor I’d run into parents who were not too pleased with their children getting a college education, esp. in my field of Computer Science.
They really did have a reasoning along the lines of “If a 10th grade* education was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my kid.”
This was geographic. Didn’t seem to happen in other areas I taught. Also minorities definitely didn’t have this attitude. Whole extended families would show up to help move in the first kid in the family to go to college.
I graduated HS in 1976. And got my BS from a major university in the then-new field of Computer Science in 1979.
My Dad was less-than-thrilled with my choice of majors, despite the computer tech explosion going on at the time. He was totally insistent that I and my siblings graduate from college. He just couldn’t get behind CS as a major.
The whole idea was just too amorphous / ethereal for him to follow. Had I chosen digital electrical engineering he’d have been totally happy. He loved machinery and that would have been sufficiently concrete and real for him to comprehend and appreciate. CS, by contrast, was about smoke and mirrors.
A few years later he had come around.
Yes, we are all products of the era in which we’re born. And become obsolete as we age. Some try harder than others to keep up. But almost none succeed completely even during their working years, much less their retired years.
And you could teach literacy lessons using Communist-themed materials to begin with so the ideas are learned from the start (which is something they learned from religious missionaries).
As indeed was one the first things the Nazis did on taking power: fairly quickly the school-books started using military examples for arithmetic, and anti-Semitic texts for language.
The trope about a father violently resisting education, even basic literacy, for a son isn’t unique to America. I’m sure I’ve come across examples in British literature, but even the most hidebound farm labourer must have realised that some very basic literacy was needed to keep farms going, never mind industrial work: though the whole “not for the likes of us” syndrome hangs around in attenuated form still.
My first impulse was that we are dealing with an extreme narcissist. People like this often consider their children to be essentially living Barbie dolls who are extensions of themselves. They often attack, denigrate, or attempt to prevent anything that would allow the child to achieve independence… especially if it means the child would be perceived as more talented or more skilled than the parent. For this kind of person, the problem is not the reading itself.
Now if the episode was about a person who specifically hated books and reading, absent any other motivation, that sounds pretty contrived to me.
There is, in many cases, a tendency for parents to not want their parents to excel beyond their own achievements. My grandfather always looked down on reading (he’s literate, but at probably a 5th grade level, which is whe:dubious:n he dropped out of school). He tends to hand anything written down and say, “GiantRat, my eyes aren’t good - read this for me.” My father is an avid reader… on the toilet, because that was the only place he could read growing up without being accused of being lazy. I read on the toilet because that was the template I was raised with… so many hours waiting to use the bathroom while dad was reading…
I guess in some cases it’s a form of unintentional repression, with the parent not wanting their progeny to exceed his/her own accomplishments.
Or maybe being in the middle of re-reading Tillich’s “Courage to Be” is mind-f*cking me. :dubious:
No, no, it was The Beverly Hillbillies. Granny catches Jethro reading about the theory of relativity, and prepares an enormous mustard plaster to cure him of intellectual pretensions, but applies it to Mr. Drysdale by mistake.
While none of them resorted to direct violence, I’ve known of or met several fathers who were against their sons being “schooled”. The three that come to mind right now are:
My great-grandfather, whose mother taught all her children to read despite her husband’s grumblings that “it for people in skirts” (women and priests).
A coworker who had inherited his mother’s love of books. His father and four brothers (all six of them worked at the same factory) reckoned paper was good if it came in a roll. JJ left regular school as soon as he was old enough to hold a job, same as his brothers, but he put himself through night HS first and a long-distance BS in Chemistry second. The father and brothers referred to him as “the alien”.
My brother’s BFF, whose father was a truck driver descended from a shortish-line of truck drivers and a very long one of muleteers. The father kicked the BFF out of the house for refusing to leave school and join the family’s business, “it’s good enough for me, it was good enough for all our foreparents, who do you think you are?”; he moved in with a cousin of the mother’s for the two years of HS he had left, then put himself through regular college (free housing in the college town courtesy of another friend whose family owned it and was happy to “lose” the income from one of the beds).