Before We Colonize Their Brains With Literacy

Most of the two-year-olds I've ever met could already sing at least part of the Alphabet Song. I didn't teach it to them. It's something that parents sing to their children at home, probably because it's one of the first songs they themselves learned.

The tune comes from the mid-18th century and accompanied several nursery rhymes including Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep, while the A-B-C lyrics were first "copyrighted" a century later (can you copyright the alphabet?). The simple, memorable tune, which was employed by Mozart in his Twelve Variations, has become the primary way that we teach the alphabet in a variety of European languages. With few exceptions, every child I've ever known has had it down by the time they were three.

For most of human history, there was no alphabet. Up until relatively recently, there were still languages in the world, that is to say entire cultures, that did not translate into a phonetic alphabet. 

A phonetic alphabet is a way to communicate through language over space and time. In doing so, it greatly simplifies language, reducing it to 26 sounds, a few diphthongs, and some consonant blends, leaving out most of the sounds humans are capable of using to communicate. In other words, the alphabet tends to restrict and simplify. In fact, since the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet by the Greeks during the 8th century BC, it's asserted that human language has likely become less varied and nuanced than in pre-alphabet eras. This, in part, reflects concerns expressed by Socrates who was famously opposed to the use of the alphabet; we know this because his student Plato recorded his words using that same alphabet.

Most languages spoken in the world today have been translated alphabetically, usually employing the letters with which anyone reading here is familiar. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote, "(A)ny society possessing the alphabet can translate any adjacent cultures into its alphabetic mode. But this is a one-way process. No non-alphabetic culture can take over an alphabetic one; because the alphabet cannot be assimilated; it can only liquidate or reduce." McLuhan suggests that it was the adoption of the alphabet that ultimately lead Western civilization down an inevitable the path to colonialism.

I often think of the culture of young children as a pre- or non-alphabetic culture. I mean, we tend to dismiss a baby's cry as a kind of "catch all" communication, leading frantic parents to "try" everything in the effort to respond to what they are trying to "tell" us. Sometimes they're telling us they're hungry. Sometimes we can't figure out what they're saying. And sometimes, perhaps more often than our alphabet shaped minds can understand, they're expressing something we are simply unable to comprehend. Looked at this way, one could argue that the alphabet song is a kind of colonial foray of adults into the world of childhood, forever liquidating and reducing it.

I'm of course not trying to make the case that we should stop singing that song, but it's also important, I think, as adults who work with young people, that we take a moment to consider that these minds not yet shaped like ours. We worry that today's technologies, like smartphones, are changing our brains, and they are, in the same way that the phonetic alphabet changes our brains. Indeed, any form of literacy -- be it technological, social-emotional, or good old fashioned reading -- changes our brains. 

McLuhan actually predicts (or at least speculates) that the phonetic alphabet, in the broader sweep of existence, may be on it's way out as technology allows us to increasingly communicate through space and time without resorting to the A-B-C's. Real world cases in point: people are sending me audio "text" messages; email is being replaced by Zoom; how-to guides have been supplanted by YouTube videos. In the future, will we even need the alphabet?

Our children's brains will change, that's what learning is, but I worry about what we lose, what we miss out on, and what harm we may be doing when we seek to rush children towards literacy. After all, long before the alphabet, the evolutionary process created human brains that were much more like our children's than the brains we carry around in our adult heads. It seems that we should respect our children as they are enough to allow them their time before we colonize their brains with literacy. Perhaps we should view these precious years as an opportunity to study what it means to think and feel and know without letters instead of, as we too often do, hurry to liquidate and reduce their experience to 26 letters.

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