The Canadian philosopher Marshal MacLuhan was the first person to sound the alarm around the emergence of a post-literate world in his book, The Gutenberg Galaxy. In this book, MacLuhan predicated that a post-literate society would replace the written word with recorded sounds (CDs, audiobooks), broadcast spoken word and music (radio), pictures (JPEG) and moving images (television, film, MPG, streaming video, video games, virtual reality).

He stated that a post-literate society would first be willfully and slowly ushered in by people who are aliterate, people who know how to read and write but choose not to, because those people would find another primary way to communicate and therefore build community. In this world, MacLuhan writes, “most if not all people would be media literate, multimedia literate, visually literate, and transliterate, but these people would not relay on the written or spoken world to actually understand and engage with the world around them.”

It is important to note that in his examination of a post-literate world, MacLuhan did not think people would have to relay on the written and spoken word to frame their thinking, but that images and media would be the vehicle to purvey concepts and ideas.

Post-literate society communication

At the time The Gutenberg Galaxy was published in the 1962, many sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists thought that this world was completely hypothetical and fantastical because man’s desire to communicate would always include reading, writing, speaking, and listening. While this notion is true, I think the question is whether these traditional tenets of literacy are increasing or decreasing in their presence in our modern lives. Today, we’re living in a world where fewer people are reading lengthy novels and printed texts, fewer people are speaking recreationally on the phone, fewer people have the capacity to listen intently to an opposing opinion.

The traditional tenets of literacy in many ways are becoming increasingly irrelevant for most people in their day-to-day lives. It’s not that people can’t read; it’s that they simply do not want to. It is not that people can’t write a long letter; it is that they don’t. It is not that people can’t pick up the phone and call someone (everyone is literally walking around with a phone in their pocket); it is that they can send a short, abbreviated text instead- an emoji is worth a thousand words.

This is how each of us is choosing to engage in our society, because we can. When enough people communicate through audio and visual media, then we are moving into a post-literate world.

This shift toward what we might call a post-literate society is a profound change in how people communicate and make sense of the world. In a post-literate world, understanding happens not through deep reading and speaking, but through immediate recognition of an image. This shift isn’t trivial. And teachers feel this shift in the classroom every day. It marks a fundamental reorganization in how many (but not all) people communicate and make sense of the world.

Where we once built shared understanding, community and identity through extended narratives delivered first orally and then through print, we now rely on visual and symbolic images that trigger pre-existing schemas and ideas that were once explained by words. In other words, in a traditional literate society, listening, speaking, reading and writing are the ways in which meaning is constructed.

In a visual society, multimedia with its pictures and symbols are the primary way people will interpret ideas, and events. Whether it is a meme, gif, emoji, short, these ubiquitous visual cues, convey and deliver ideas through images, short text, and associations that feel instantly recognizable. The immediacy and quickness to a direct and literal idea is facilitated by these visual cues.

At the same moment that this post-literate world is emerging, we are seeing a continuous decline in reading and writing scores around the world, which of course is not a coincidence. According to NAEP, the average reading score in the US in 2024 at grade 4 was 2 points lower compared to 2022 and 5 points lower compared to 2019. There is of course a wide range of factors that contribute to the steady decline of reading scores that we are seeing in our schools.

We cannot ignore the fact that society is simply no longer framed around words, and this is greatly limiting and reshaping the vocabulary, schema, and prior exposure that students have before they begin school. It is more common now to see babies, toddlers, and young children with phones and devices in their hands than books and crayons.

Society is no longer supportive of the kind of literacy that is demanded of students in classrooms, which has resulted in more and more schools embracing various science of reading curricula that requires teachers explicitly teach students the language comprehension and word recognition that is necessary to engage fully and meaningfully in text. We are seeing more and more students beginning school with limited oral and expressive language development, which is the foundation of reading and writing.

Schools will be required to take a bold and wholly systematic approach to increase literacy scores in their schools in this post-literate world. This systematic approach will require an examination of all aspects of school structures, inclusive of curriculum, instruction, culture, and operations to ensure that reading, writing, listening and speaking occur daily in every classroom.

Rubrics in all classrooms should include vocabulary requirements, students should be required to speak in full sentences and not provide one-word responses, so ideas and concepts are fully formed, required and sustained independent reading must be restored in school spaces, students and adults need to be explicitly taught how to listen to one another, students must be required to be pen or pencil active for controlled time period. No school can improve its reading or even math scores without a robust and structured approach to literacy, which is going to become increasingly more difficult in this post-literate society. Schools will continue to be required to do more.

The literacy coaches at A+ Virtual Learning care deeply about ensuring that our students read, write, speak and listen throughout the course of their school day in authentic and meaningful ways that strengthen their intellectual rigor. We work shoulder to shoulder with all stakeholders to ensure that literacy skills remain the primary focus and vehicle for students to communicate, collaborate and critically think about the world around them. If you are a school or district that is witnessing the decline of literacy skills in your school community but would like to ensure that students remain linguistically engaged in an increasingly digitized age, we would love to hear from you and partner with you.