The Illiterate User

This note is part of a series that critiques the cult of literacy in libraries — exposing how reading, writing, and the book have been crowned as the only valid forms of knowledge, while everything else is silenced, excluded, or reshaped to fit the page. Check all the notes in this section's index.

The Library and the Broken Visitor

Walk into any public library, and you will be welcomed — warmly, often sincerely. But beneath that welcome lives a powerful assumption: that you came to read.

To read. To decode symbols, to search the catalog, to navigate signage, to interpret forms, to understand policies, to follow instructions. Whether you arrive for pleasure, support, or survival, the library greets you with a text. And if you cannot read that text, you are no longer a user. You are a problem.

In this framework, illiteracy is not seen as a condition — it is seen as a failure. A lack. A sign that something essential is missing, and that the library must now intervene. The institution becomes a place not of access, but of correction. And the person who cannot or does not read becomes someone to be improved.

The library's hospitality turns into a subtle form of violence — one built not on exclusion, but on rehabilitation.

Signage, Instruction, and the Language of Power

Every aspect of library navigation is coded in print. Directional signage, computer terminals, help desk forms, checkout machines, digital catalogs, policy documents — all rely on text. They assume not only literacy, but a specific kind: bureaucratic, formal, often in the dominant/official language. The space does not speak. It expects the user to decipher.

Even so-called "accessible" systems — icons, touchscreens, multilingual brochures — still orbit around the written word. They assist, but do not disrupt. They smooth the path for the literate. They do not question why the path is textual in the first place.

Instructional sessions and "information literacy" training reinforce this. Users are taught how to search, cite, and verify — using academic tools and conventions. These are not bad skills. But they are always framed as the baseline. The norm. The necessary step toward becoming an informed, respectable, empowered participant in knowledge culture.

There is no path of equal dignity for the user who cannot — or will not — read.

Shame as Access Policy

Libraries rarely acknowledge the emotional landscape of literacy. They treat it as a skill set, not a history of violence, exclusion, or trauma. But for many users, approaching a book, a form, a catalog interface is not neutral. It is humiliating. It is a reminder of how many times the world has said: you are behind. You are not ready. You are not enough.

Libraries often try to compensate. They offer adult literacy programs, reading tutors, simplified instructions. And these are not without value. But they are almost always rooted in the assumption that the user — not the system — must be changed.

The shame is not addressed. It is redirected — softened by help, masked by services, but never questioned as a structural outcome of a literate-centered model.

The right to know becomes contingent on the willingness to learn to read.

A Library That Doesn't Assume

What would it mean to design a library that does not treat illiteracy as a deficit?

It would mean building systems that prioritize voice, presence, and community over textual command. It would mean creating spaces where knowledge is exchanged through conversation, gesture, memory, or song. It would mean recognizing that many forms of intelligence, experience, and expertise are not — and have never been — mediated by the page.

Such a library would not abandon reading. It would simply stop demanding it. It would make room for users who move differently through the world. And it would treat their presence not as a challenge, but as a signal that something important has been missing all along.