How do people become literate?

The Egyptian king Psamtik I (664-610 BC) asked this same question. He believed the answer could be found in raising babies in isolation to see how they began to communicate. He commanded two infants to be placed in a shepherd's hut with only a shepherd bringing milk and food to them daily. Because one baby eventually yelled, "bekos", the Phrygian word for "bread", people began to believe that Phrygian was the original language of all humankind, but we have no evidence to support this theory.

It's not as difficult to trace the first written language as it is the first spoken one. We have samples of clay "tokens" dating as far back as 8,000 - 4,000 BC, some in clay envelopes with markings that signified what was inside. This first symbolic representation was probably used to quantify cattle, sheep, etc. As Wolf states (2007), ". . . the world of letters may have begun as an envelope for the world of numbers" (p. 27).

The second breakthrough came when a system of symbols was created that could preserve a person's thoughts over time and space. This Cuneiform writing used pictographs in a rebus-type way that showed a symbol representing its sound. (Do you remember reading rebus stories with pictures of eyes and cans to represent "I can"?) As new civilizations emerged, much was added until the writing system became so complicated that by the time the Akkadian writing system evolved, it took 6 - 7 years to master. (Sound familiar?) The power of reading was restricted to a small, exclusive group of people in the temple and the court.

A final breakthrough came when the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians evolved into an efficient two-cursive form of writing and they discovered the idea of phonemes by creating a partial alphabet for consonants based on an internal, sound-based structure of words.

History proves that most writing systems hung on to languages of previous cultures. The English language is no exception. It includes Greek, Latin, French, Old English, and many other roots. According to Wolf (2007), it's " . . . a historical mishmash of homage and pragmatism . . at a cost known to every first- and second-grader" (p. 42).

To read a word, a person must identify the letters in the visual association areas of the brain, then use the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas to provide information about the smallest sounds in words (phonemes), and lastly process its meaning, function, and connections to other words in the temporal and parietal lobes. Of course the processing of the reading brain is just one piece of a literate person, although an important one.

So how do people become literate? It's simple . . . right?