When Jake Taught Nog to Read

[Six of Twelve]

I assume Nog was taught to read Federation Standard, and not in Ferengi.

But why didn't Nog already know how to read Ferengi? Reading is important for a businessman, so as not to be cheated in a contract and to be able to search for loopholes in contracts, etc. It's also needed for math and in calculating profit,keeping a ledger, etc. It's obvious Quark and Rom could read, so it makes no sense that the teenage Nog could not. And Nog had to be pretty bright to come up to speed in order to attend Starfleet Academy so quickly.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Nog was Rom's son, and Rom clearly didn't have the lobes for business. So Rom would have raised Nog to be like him, not like uncle Quark.

And even so, Nog didn't seem like he had any friends until he met Jake. So Nog was probably not very well motivated until that time.

 

[Six of Twelve]

Still, Quark interfered in Nog's upbringing quite often. Rom knew how to read in order to read technical schematics and other technical stuff. He couldn't have been part of the Bajoran maintenance team otherwise. It also seems that Ishka would have cared for Nog when he was little - and I don't recall the Ferengi barring females from literacy. Remember that she taught her sons the Rules of Acquisition, which I imagine the Ferengi use the Rules to teach reading

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I don't recall the Ferengi barring females from literacy.

Actually, I think they did do exactly that.

They clearly banned females from doing pretty much anything to improve their lives (which means Quark is obviously full of shit when he says the Ferengi have never practiced slavery).

 

[Bad Thoughts]

I loved Niles Crane's response to "what does not kill you makes you stronger": "not everyone makes it into that second group!" Much in that spirit, the extreme form of mercantile capitalism practiced by the Ferengi would seem to leave many behind, like Rom and his son, and provides them with few tools to understand their predicament. Quark exploits Rom like family, just as the Rules of Acquisition advise, leaving Rom resigned. Indeed, he believes he is inferior, being less intelligent and having little to contribute. I'm not surprised that he would let his son fall behind, or that it would be Nog himself would take the steps to pull himself out of the situation.

 

[Paradise City]

I used to know some people in the black economy who couldn't read. But they were fine traders at that level. I think early DS9 tried to tap in to that sensibility and we see that with Nog getting caught for petty crime. A dystopian post-occupation world were even Quark and his little bar barely gets enough to keep his small business afloat, hasn't time/interest to spare to attend to Nog's education.

Also, how Ferengi children mature is another question. It may also be custom to become literate at a later age.

 

[Kor]

It's interesting that Rom at the beginning of the series was more of a shrewd business-like Ferengi, not the bumbling oaf he became thereafter. See, for example, his conversation with Keiko in "A Man Alone."

Kor

 

[Six of Twelve]

Unless canon specified that females could not be literate, I won't assume this is so, considering canon tells us that Ishka taught both her sons the Rules of Acquisition and that particular fact did not scandalize Quark or Rom, as her wearing clothes did.

 

[kkt]

You don't necessarily have to be able to read in order to remember 285 rules. They're short and simple.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

It's interesting that Rom at the beginning of the series was more of a shrewd business-like Ferengi, not the bumbling oaf he became thereafter. See, for example, his conversation with Keiko in "A Man Alone."

Kor

Then, when Nog was pleading with Sisko for a shot at starfleet, he said he didn't have the lobes for business. Then, in Treachery, Faith and the Great River, he's suddenly a shrewd trader.

Fairly small inconsistencies.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

he's suddenly a shrewd trader.

Compared to a less savvy enlisted man. In general, who knows.

 

[Six of Twelve]

You don't necessarily have to be able to read in order to remember 285 rules. They're short and simple.

I watched Family Business last night where Ishka was trying to conceal her business activities when Quark caught her using a pad, by telling him she was writing a letter to a relative, obviously an acceptable activity for her. She could read and write. Case closed.

 

[Kor]

Lots of cultures historically got along with the majority being illiterate. They might have certain clerics who are assigned the "dirty" business of reading and writing, as other people don't want to be bothered with such minutiae. Or there might be certain individuals (bards?) whose life work is to commit long passages of their culture's history and stories to memory verbatim and pass it all along to others.

Kor

 

[Six of Twelve]

Lots of cultures historically got along with the majority being illiterate. They might have certain clerics who are assigned the "dirty" business of reading and writing, as other people don't want to be bothered with such minutiae. Or there might be certain individuals (bards?) whose life work is to commit long passages of their culture's history and stories to memory verbatim and pass it all along to others.

Kor

For a pre-industrial, low-tech society, sure. But once a society industrializes and the pace of tech advancement picks up, then literacy becomes important for everyone. Because the Ferengi are a spacefaring species and not a pre-industrial one, literacy should be as important to them as any other spacefaring species. And it's just more profitable to be literate.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

For a pre-industrial, low-tech society, sure. But once a society industrializes and the pace of tech advancement picks up, then literacy becomes important for everyone. Because the Ferengi are a spacefaring species and not a pre-industrial one, literacy should be as important to them as any other spacefaring species. And it's just more profitable to be literate.

Yes, literacy does become important. However, illiteracy does not preclude the transmission of knowledge.

 

[Christian Weston Chandler]

Actually, I think they did do exactly that.

They clearly banned females from doing pretty much anything to improve their lives (which means Quark is obviously full of shit when he says the Ferengi have never practiced slavery).

While I wouldn't dispute defining Ferengi women as slaves, I don't think Quark is so much being full of shit as using a specific definition of slavery (and one, actually, that I think is important to distinguish from other types of slavery or 'unfreedom'). Namely, Ferengi women aren't forced into unpaid labor - they're outright barred from productive work. While their lack of freedoms and privileges means that they certainly conform to certain English definitions of "slave", they don't fit into mold of the "quintessential slave" in the sense that their economic potential is not being forcibly exploited. Since the Ferengi don't really subscribe to Federation standards of hewmon rights, and since their entire cultural and social psychology is based around the economic, this absence of the economic component probably means that Ferengi women don't qualify as slaves to someone like Quark.

From an out-of-universe standpoint, I also think that's what the viewer - perhaps the 1980's American viewer especially - was supposed to understand by Quark's claim that there have never been slaves in Ferengi society. They never actually forced people to work without pay under threat of violence (especially not of a hereditary kind, which is considered especially heinous and is an important part of the definition of slavery in modern times). The Ferengi certainly oppress their women to the point that yes, it would be correct to call them slaves from a certain standpoint, but what Quark really meant was that his people haven't practiced that specific form/institution of oppression which usually comes to mind when English-speakers hear the word slavery - someone doing hard labor under threat of violence until the day he dies, and his children being forced into the same type of oppression, and their children after that.

As fair as I know, Ishka lives a life of relative leisure (to the point that she constantly desires to break the monotony by engaging in productive work in secret). Quark and Rom neither beat her, nor do I think there's any indication that they'd have the legal authority or the social standing to use violence to control her behavior. And while any female children would share her unfree status, that would be a result of their sex, NOT their kinship to her - her male children are free (just as female children of male Ferengi would be unfree). Her condition isn't one that's inherited based on ancestry, generation after generation into perpetuity.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I get Quark's point. The life that I imagine when I consider the conditions that human slaves live in is quite different, and honestly, worse than, the one that Ishka leads. I'd rather be Ishka than an African-American (male OR female) slave on a plantation. Touché, Quark. Their treatment of women is still inexcusable, and their laws regarding wages, worker's conditions and labor organizations mean that, rather than a limited number of people being actual slaves, you have a majority living in conditions just above slavery. So the Federation still have the moral high ground; it's just that when it comes to this one horrible thing, humans historically did it while the Ferengi didn't.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Then how do you explain the bit in "Family Business" where Ishka is almost sold as a slave? She only avoids this fate because she makes a full confession of her illegal business activities. And it's implied that this is standard practice whenever the FCA catches a female earning profit.

As for Ishka herself - she was very much a maverick in Ferengi society, obviously. The only reason she wasn't a slave is because she refused to accept being one (also because she and her husband actually loved each other and had a stable home life, which may or may not be common among Ferengi families). Most of her fellow females didn't have Ishka's courage, so they really were slaves. Slaves who lived in gilded cages, perhaps, but still slaves.

 

[Christian Weston Chandler]

^ Then how do you explain the bit in "Family Business" where Ishka is almost sold as a slave? She only avoids this fate because she makes a full confession of her illegal business activities. And it's implied that this is standard practice whenever the FCA catches a female earning profit.

As for Ishka herself - she was very much a maverick in Ferengi society, obviously. The only reason she wasn't a slave is because she refused to accept being one (also because she and her husband actually loved each other and had a stable home life, which may or may not be common among Ferengi families). Most of her fellow females didn't have Ishka's courage, so they really were slaves. Slaves who lived in gilded cages, perhaps, but still slaves.

Could you give the exact quote for the bit you're talking about? If she indeed almost gets sold as a slave, then there's nothing for me to explain; Quark simply lied or was incorrect when he said the Ferengi don't practice slavery (the most reasonable explanation being inconsistency on the part of the writers).

Also, you're repeating multiple times that females in Ferengi society are slaves - I already said that I don't dispute this, so you're preaching to the choir. The word "slave" is quite broad and can be used, at least in English, to denote all kinds of "unfree" or "less free" people, and Ferengi women are definitely lacking in freedom. My point, however, was that Quark was almost certainly referring to a slave in the sense of a class of people who do involuntary labor and whose status is hereditary; this is what people generally mean by "slave", and the fact that the writers did not specify this or use a more precise term like "chattel slave" was because most people already understand the word "slave" when otherwise unqualified to mean a chattel slave in most modern contexts. Ferengi women are actually forbidden from engaging in labor, which is an injustice of a different kind. Quark being a Ferengi businessman, it's quite logical within the story as well for him to refer to a slave in the economic sense rather than in terms of rights or freedoms (again, I repeat for the final time that Ferengi women have little to no freedoms, that people with as few freedoms as they do can indeed be called slaves according to the Oxford English dictionary, and that their status is unjust).

It makes much more sense to assume that Quark was talking about chattel slavery, rather than to assume that he was lying about the status of Ferengi women, since he's OPEN about the fact that Ferengi women are oppressed in various episodes and indeed champions the idea that they should be oppressed until he learns his lesson. I almost immediately understood Quark's comment about human slavery to be a reference to the common human practice of chattel slavery, not an assertion that Ferengi society is free of oppression; I'm sure that most other viewers did as well. If you told someone who'd never watched Star Trek that all Ferengi women are slaves, they would probably get the wrong impression of how their society functions; that's because "slave" is or has become a very broad word, but not all types of unfreedom are equal to chattel slavery and chattel slavery is the first thing that comes to mind when someone says "slave".

It seems almost certain that that was the writers' assumption as well, the only possible alternative being that this is a plothole since Quark has no motive to lie about how Ferengi women are treated.

 

[Paradise City]

For a pre-industrial, low-tech society, sure. But once a society industrializes and the pace of tech advancement picks up, then literacy becomes important for everyone. Because the Ferengi are a spacefaring species and not a pre-industrial one, literacy should be as important to them as any other spacefaring species. And it's just more profitable to be literate.

If you can speak to a computer and the computer gives any info away verbally then urgency to be literate isn't what it was.

 

[Six of Twelve]

If you can speak to a computer and the computer gives any info away verbally then urgency to be literate isn't what it was.

What do you do when the computer goes down.

I can't believe anyone is defending ilkiteracy