Literacy for democracy

Abstract

After a brief description of the three conditions or phases of alphabetic reading and spelling learning, I examine the consequences of socioeconomic and sociocultural inequalities both on the beginning and the development of literacy and, more generally, on cognitive development. Given that the access to literacy for all or, on the contrary, only for an elite has also consequences for the society governance, in the third and final part of this paper I discuss what, through many centuries, had been democracy and what it should be, as well as the contribution that the universalization of literacy and of a culture based on free thinking may have for constructing an authentic democracy.