The social circumstances of illiteracy: Interpretation and exchange in a class-based society

Illiteracy, an extreme form of educational failure, is best understood in social structural terms, rather than as an individual psychological phenomenon. This structural interpretation of illiteracy is similar to critical institutional treatments of poverty, inadequate health care, and other persistent “social problems.” Instead of treating such problems as manifestations of remediable systemic imperfections, they are construed to be predictable consequences of the routine working of basic institutions in a class-based society. The institutionally determined social circumstances of illiteracy, moreover, are complemented by a context-specific logic that makes illiteracy a substantively “rational” achievment. In spite of its interpretable rationality, however, illiteracy retains the character of a self-inflicted wound that indexes a broad range of even more debilitating grievances.