http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/21/children-do-not-write-letters

This short article was published in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only just come across it. According to a survey by World Vision, one in five children today have never received a handwritten letter, and about one in four children have never written one themselves. Erasmus would surely be horrified at this symptom of the quick-fix lives we lead in the rich developed world of the twenty-first century. The education expert Sue Palmer (of ‘Toxic Childhood’ fame) offers some wisdom in this piece, although is she right to claim that ‘literacy is the hallmark of human civilisation’? (Answers on a handwritten postcard…)

Palmer’s view of literacy is a limited one – apparently emails and text messages are not evidence of literacy. She emphasises the importance of the physical effort involved in writing a letter by hand, and the pleasure of receiving a material text that can be treasured as an object. I don’t think we can disagree with her on this. True ‘literacy’, then, is firmly grounded in visible, tangible materials of writing and reading. Is this a fair and realistic expectation today, and can we really, like Palmer, relegate less tangible forms of communication to some other category?