The Theft of Meaning: How Literacy Became Enclosure

They Sent Me an Article to Read. They Didn’t Think About What It Said.

The literacy industry prioritises control over comprehension, enforcing rigid standards that erase diverse ways of learning. This piece examines how colonialism and capitalism shape who is seen—and who is ignored.

Introduction: The Burden of Being Unseen

It arrives in my inbox without a second thought. Thought you’d be interested in this, Dr H. A forwarded article, another glossy piece about literacy, another “expert” proclaiming solutions that aren’t solutions at all. I scan it out of obligation, already knowing what I will find—a framework that does not see me, a theory that does not account for the way I learned, a model that would have left me behind had I not clawed my way out on my own.

There is no malice in the sender’s intent. No deliberate exclusion. Just a thoughtless assumption masquerading as consideration. I thought of you. But they didn’t. Not really. If they had, they would have known that the language of this article is the language of the system that failed me, that fails so many. They would have recognised it as a product, not a pedagogy—as an advertisement, not an insight.

They do not see the weight of such a message. How it presses against old wounds, how it confirms the quiet truth I have always known: I do not belong in the spaces they assume I do. The “literacy expert” they imagine me to be is not the literacy survivor I actually am. The knowledge they think I will appreciate is the very knowledge that erased me.

This is not just about an email. It is about a lifetime of being unseen, unheard, unconsidered. Of being forced to fit into a system that was never built for me. It is about literacy as a colonial tool, about education as enclosure, about how companies masquerading as advocates for learning have no interest in the myriad, only the one—only what is measurable, sellable, profitable.

And so I write—not just to respond, but to be heard in a world that still refuses to listen. The poem below is not simply a reflection of my experience, but a mirror to a system that continues to let students slip through its fingers, that still believes it can define literacy in a way that excludes those of us who think, speak, and read differently.

Because I was not supposed to make it through school functionally illiterate.
Because it was never my failure—it was theirs.
Because, despite everything, I am still here.

And I will not be unseen.

The One Against the Myriad

The one has no memory. It has no song, no rhythm beyond the tick of measured time, no knowledge that cannot be owned, extracted, controlled. It does not pass wisdom through generations; it locks it behind credentials and copyrights, buries it in paywalled archives that demand permission to enter.

But the myriad remembers.

Long before the schoolroom, before the printing press, before the artificiality of syllables dissected and prosody reduced to a performance, we knew how to hold knowledge in our bones. The West Highland kinships—our people—carried history not in ink, but in breath, in voice, in the way a story lived inside you long after it was told. Memory was not something external, trapped in pages and bound by rules. It was a current that flowed, as natural as the birds wheeling in the sky or the wind spilling down the glen.

And then came the one.

Colonialism came first with its swords, then with its laws, then with its schools. And still the Genocide of the Gaels continues, not by blood this time, but by erasure. By the imposition of a literacy that does not belong to us. By a way of knowing that measures our fluency in speed and efficiency, in correct pronunciation and perfect recall—but never in depth.

The old way of learning was fluid. It was whole. It belonged to everyone. Now, it is gatekept. Now, the flow of language is broken into data points, chopped into assessments, monitored and monetised. Prosody is no longer the breath of life through a verse but a performance, something to be measured, to be scored.

And I feel the weight of it.

Perhaps it is the HRT—the way it has cracked me open, given me access to emotions I had been walled off from for so long. Perhaps it is simply the reality of seeing the world clearly for the first time and realising how much has been lost. It is not mere dreariness, nor simple moroseness, but something older, deeper—a longing, an ancestral grief. A sadness that comes from knowing that after all this time, after centuries of supposed progress, so little has changed.

And what has changed, has changed for the worse.

They would have called my people illiterate once. Because we did not read the way they did. Because we did not write the way they did. Because we did not own knowledge the way they did. And now, they do the same to others. To students who learn in patterns rather than sequences. To those who find meaning in wholes rather than parts. To those for whom language is something vast and lived, rather than something to be conquered and caged.

I was never meant to understand within their system.
I was only meant to function within it.

And yet, against all odds, I do understand now.
And that, perhaps, is the greatest sorrow of all.

For in understanding, I see too clearly that their one was never meant for the myriad.
It was only ever meant to destroy it.

The Literacy of Empire

(Or, should one graduate from schooling as a functional illiterate?)

I. The One

Sit.
Decode.
Drill.
Repeat.
Faster now, smoother now,
until your mouth forgets its own shape
and becomes the machine we need it to be.

Fluency is speed.
Comprehension is compliance.
Meaning is secondary.
Do not ask why the words do not fit your tongue.
Do not ask why they slip like oil through your hands.
Do not ask.
Do not question.
Do not think.

Struggle is failure.
Failure is defect.
Defect is a burden
we will not carry.

II. The Myriad

Before letters, there was song.
Before phonemes, there was breath.
Before fluency, there was knowing.

I was not born into their words.
I did not arrive in this world
with their language stitched into my skin.
English is not my mother.
It does not cradle me,
does not soothe me in the dark.
It is a foreign tongue
I wear like ill-fitting shoes—
useful only when required,
discarded the moment I step back into myself.

I learned to read in rhythm,
in the hush of wind through needles,
in the dance of shadows across dry stone.
But they did not call that literacy.
They did not call that knowing.

And so they buried me beneath their rules,
their rubrics, their reading logs,
marked me absent
even as I spoke in the language of the world itself.

They gave me sight words like rations,
pre-measured, pre-approved.
Enough to function,
never enough to roam.
I could read a stop sign,
fill out a form,
scan a menu,
but meaning was a country
I could not enter.

I was not quite “illiterate,”
but I was never free.

III. The Reckoning

They build their empires on metrics and measures,
on scripted lessons and market shares.
Their programs do not seek to teach—
only to count,
to track,
to sell.

Their literacy is not fluency.
It is enclosure.
It is standardisation.
It is the theft of meaning.

And still, they wonder why
so many slip through the cracks
when they were the ones
who built the cracks in the first place.

I was left to drift,
a ghost in their classrooms,
a cipher they could not decode.

I did not learn to read—not truly—
until the world no longer controlled the terms.
Until I could move beyond their fragments,
their sight words, their sentence stems,
and step into the vastness
of language as belonging.

I did not fail literacy.
Literacy failed me.

And I am not alone.

Final thoughts …

And so the native ad lands in my inbox—unquestioned, unchallenged, passed along as if it were truth. Thought you’d be interested in this, Dr H. As if I wouldn’t see it for what it is. As if I, of all people, would not recognise a sales pitch dressed up as pedagogy, a product masquerading as progress.

And worst of all, as if I have not already spoken to this.

As if Chapter 2 of Holistic Language Instruction does not exist.
As if it does not contain page after page of research, of evidence, of lived experience proving the validity of the myriad.
As if the one has not chosen to ignore that same evidence for decades upon decades.

And here it is again.
Dressed in new words, wrapped in the same colonial framework, the same corporate machinery.
Dropped into my inbox as if I should be grateful.

And I must be grateful.

I must receive it with a courteous smile and a polite thank you!
I must nod along, as if I have not spent years fighting for an approach that sees all learners,
as if I have not already written at length about the damage this very thinking has done,
as if it is me who must be appreciative.

Me. Unappreciative.

Ugh.

This is the great unspoken within the literacy movement: that the status quo must be preserved at all costs. That the very people who claim to champion literacy dare not question the foundations upon which their industry rests. That they cannot afford to rock the boat—because their livelihoods, their funding, their reputations depend upon things staying exactly as they are.

And what a dark thought that is.

To realise that the vast machine of literacy education is not built to liberate but to sustain itself. That it does not care whether students understand, only that they comply. That its goal is not fluency, not knowledge, not connection—but the continued profitability of the one at the expense of the myriad.

And all the while, the same colleagues who uncritically forward me these ads, these “resources,” these empty frameworks—these same colleagues sit in meetings and lament the lack of critical thinking in their students.

They expect children to question texts, to evaluate sources, to engage in deep analysis—
Yet they themselves do not stop to ask who funds the research, who benefits from the programs, whose voices are missing from the conversation.
They do not question what literacy truly is, or why it is defined so narrowly, or why so many slip through the cracks that were designed to be there in the first place.

I suppose it is easier to judge students for failing to think critically than it is to ask why their teachers have stopped doing so.

And so I write.
Not because I am unappreciative.
Not because I am rude.
Not because I cannot “just let it go.”

But because I know what it is to be unseen.
Because I know what it is to be dismissed, erased, ignored.
Because literacy—true literacy—is not about reading at speed, not about decoding for efficiency, not about conformity.

It is about understanding.

And understanding is precisely what they fear the most.