Some Effects of Literacy in Eighteenth-Century France
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3311067 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Markoff (0000-0001-6629-4417, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1986 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 311 |
| Publication date | 1986-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/204768 |
| OpenAlex | W2315597916 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Some Effects of Literacy in Eighteenth-Century France Two decades ago a team of sociologists conducted a study of the attitudinal consequences of literacy in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. They found, through a carefully designed sample survey of factory workers and rural cultivators, that the outlook of the literate differed in a number of particulars from their nonliterate compatriots. The literate, for example, were more likely to identify themselves as Pakistanis, a finding clearly in accord with the common view of literacy acting to extend one's horizons beyond a restricted local world. What is more striking, however, is the degree to which their data showed that in most concrete life situations literacy was not a particularly powerful shaper of attitudes. When asked to characterize their willingness to move to West Pakistan in search of higher income, there was a marked difference between the willing factory workers and the unwilling cultivators. The literate respondents, however, differed little from the unlettered.1 A still more striking feature of the data was the frequency with which literacy did indeed appear consequential-but only within a particular social setting. The literate, for example, expressed greater admiration for philanthropic bosses than they did for ascetic preachers-but only among factory workers; among the cultivators, literacy produced no effect on this item at all. In short, what these researchers documented for East Pakistan was that, although literacy appeared to be a matter of some significance, a good deal of that significance depended on the specific
Literacy · Pedagogy · Political science · Sociology · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 1988 - 2015 (28) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |