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The fundamental right to literacy: reading, writing, and computing | | | What's missing today?
With increasing professional and public reliance on the Internet and a knowledge of computing, educational disparities have exponentially worsened. As a result, numerous cohorts of high school graduates enter civic society and the professional world with minimal or no understanding of computers, the Internet, and the systems behind them. This significant gap in education rides the coattails of underfunded schools lacking sufficient technology and equipment with which to instruct students. This reality renders even qualified educators unable to teach students computing. In other words, even in states where a right to education is guaranteed, computing is often a secondary or tertiary budgetary concern, resulting in a severe lack of updated, usable technology. Although there is no "quick-fix," particularly in urban areas, State commitments to providing a satisfactory standard of public education following their constitutional provisions have brought about significant improvements. Adding computing competency to the public and legal definitions of basic literacy/education will help equalize academic outcomes and enable the right to be more "carefully described," hopefully paving the way for SCOTUS recognition. | |
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> | But what does computing competency entail? Computing competency, or more to the point, computer literacy, constitutes a "basic, nontechnical knowledge about computers and how to use them; familiarity and experience with computers, software, and computer systems," according to dictionary.com. However, much like the instinctual definition of literacy is the ability to read and write, an exact metric is much more difficult to define. Surely, many students within the 22% of New York City's "illiterate" high school graduates have some ability to connect written letters with corresponding sounds. Their reading levels, on the other hand, vary widely and do not meet an acceptable threshold to meaningfully engage in civic society. This discrepancy is analogous to computing. The New York City public school system has required middle school students (grades 5 and up) to take typing classes. Often, schools will provide educational computer games through which students learn a plethora of academic concepts through a computer. However, it is clear that these existing forms of instruction can seldom provide students with an understanding of the Internet and computing systems sufficient to self-actualize in the digital space. Moreover, many schools (especially in NYC) lack the infrastructure for meaningful computing education. From outdated devices and software to a dearth of qualified educators, the already-nebulous level of 'sufficient' computing education cannot be achieved under current conditions. | | | Finding even a State right to computing competency will improve academic and civic outcomes. | | | The next step is another attempt at SCOTUS recognition
In general, that computing is an essential part of modern day society is common knowledge. It is a growing matter of public conscience, particularly in spaces of policymaking and academia. Therefore, incorporating computing competency into the definition of basic literacy required to participate in civic affairs will elevate the ongoing struggle for recognizing the right to literacy, as a whole. In the wake of Gary B., perhaps greater awareness and a more narrowly tailored description of a right to literacy will help advance the claim. | |
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A very good draft, difficult to improve along its own lines.
"Literacy," as historians of the subject will tell you, is an exhausting property to define, and the social historians who have reduced it in the end to the ability to scrawl a signature on a document that the signer may not have been able to read in a comprehending fashion is just one aspect of that problem. Literacy in computing, likewise, can come to be defined as the limited ability to interact with a limited number of computer programs in one or more user interface environments. This not only defines too limited a cognitive engagement, but fails to surface the real intended connotation of "literacy," which implies mastery of a tool for further educational and social progress.
So some further analytic assessment of what constitutes basic computing literacy might be valuable.
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