due 12/04/15 - 1000words essay - no internet -only one source

EDF 3660 Online Final Exam

Directions: Respond to the three questions below. There is no restriction on the length of your response for the questions. Students typically use between 1000 words for each response. Be sure that you fully answer ALL parts of the question. Don’t waste time and words defining terms-stick to simply answering what is asked of you in each question. For all responses, be sure to use specific examples from your textbook to support your major points. DO NOT USE INTERNET SOURCES ON YOUR EXAM!! If you use internet sources on your exam, you will receive a grade of zero.

You must type your responses using word processing software (save your file as .doc or .rtf). Your work must be double-spaced, 12 Font, Times New Roman with 1” margins. All essays must have an introduction and conclusion as well. Save your file in the following format: LastName_First Initial_Final Exam and submit it in the Final Exam drop box by the posted due date.

The following exam format gives you an opportunity to show how effectively you can develop and express your ideas. You should, therefore, take care to develop your point of view, present your ideas logically and clearly, and use language from the course content precisely. Use your OWN words, with 3-4 quotes from the book to support your major points.

Topic

1. 1) Describe and explain how the different perspectives on literacy—the conventional, the functional, the cultural, and the critical—potentially serve different social groups and different ideological orientations in contrasting ways. Be sure to include specific examples in your response.

Describe and explain how the different perspectives on literacy—the conventional, the functional, the cultural, and the critical—potentially serve different social groups and different ideological orientations in contrasting ways. Be sure to include specific examples in your response.

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troduction: Revisiting Literacy Chapters 1 through 3 in this text form a particularly useful foundation for our examination of literacy. Chapter 1 begins our reflection on the relationship between education and the development of human reason. We consider the legacy of ethnic, racial, and gender exclusion from that liberal or “freeing” education that, as Aristotle characterized it, is “worthy of a free man.” We also begin our examination of property relations, which worked to limit access to this education, and the intertwined gender, race, and colonial relations, which served to justify an education for what Rousseau would call “role-playing” rather than free choices in acquiring the freedoms that Jefferson would intone as central to “the pursuit of happiness.” Chapter 2 described Thomas Jefferson’s faith in the ability of an educated populace to safeguard its liberties. In particular, Jefferson believed that the skills of reading and writing would equip people to stay informed about social, economic, and political events and thus help them recognize and protect their interests. Popular literacy was for Jefferson and other classical liberals one of the cornerstones of a free society. Our current condition has left educators to ponder the relationship between a local emphasis on access to fair education and education policy forged by national imperatives. For example, the overarching federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies have left us with challenging questions regarding rhetorical and real goals of education. Students and teachers are facing new strictures regarding the relationship between classroom time spent in search of equal educational goals or spent in search of the pedagogical recipe that will result in more correct answers on standardized tests. Critics such as the National Center for Fair & Open Testing have questioned whether this emphasis, which is purported to benchmark success, holding schools accountable for those traditionally underachieving, has paradoxically deprived those children. They argue that these students are less likely to learn higher levels of critical and creative thinking, which are essential for fair access to higher education. Read more at location 271

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One ideal of literacy is that students learn to negotiate multiple texts and prepare for democracy and its communication challenges. Under NCLB and the larger reform agenda, students most at risk for missing access to high literacy are subjected to reading programs scripted to be read by teachers. Schools and districts that adopt these reading programs are required to sign assurances that scripts will be followed to the letter. Education critic Jonathan Kozol describes a school where one of these programs, Success For All, is implemented. Consistent with scripted teaching, educational behaviors are strictly monitored. He writes: “There was, it seemed, a formal name for every cognitive event within this school: ‘Authentic Writing,’ ‘Active Listening,’ ‘Accountable Talk.’ The naming systems are allied to a re-Taylorization of curriculum. Like that earlier effort, these regimes have ‘a way of ordering cognition . . . [that] disproportionately affects low SES and minority schools.’”1 Thus, while scripted reading and regimes of order and discipline are prescribed to address the “achievement gap” between minority and middle-class students, research results show few positive effects on achievement. These techniques are more likely to be approaches in which students are only asked to respond mechanically, not creatively, nor to bring in their personal backgrounds and knowledge. Only correct recall of factual information and accuracy are emphasized. In middle-class schools where children come to school with requisite social capital to meet benchmarks, there is still in-district competition for scores, but fewer interruptions in teacher autonomy on curriculum. Meanwhile the USA Patriot Act works to increase surveillance on information outlets and library borrowing for the stated purpose of tracking terrorism. Education in the “national interest” may compete with the freedom to teach for developing a democratic appraisal of current conditions. At stake is the ideal of an edu cation that, again as Jefferson cited, enables one to identify and affect conditions that either “secure or endanger” one’s freedom. At the same time, Jefferson’s view of literacy reveals serious limitations in his social and political thought. Like his contemporaries, for example, he limited non-Whites’ access to literacy. His Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge provided for literacy for White children but not for children of African American or Native American descent. Jefferson’s classical liberal assumptions about the inherent superiority of Whites undergirded his views about literacy and political participation . Chapter 3 sends us in search of the foundations of freedom and exclusion, which continue to trouble the “public” education Mann inspired. Our public schools tantalize us with the promise of a free, fair, and humanizing universal education, while they also taunt us with the vestiges of exclusion, education for “evident and probable destinies,” blind patriotism, and inadequate fair access to the goods of an increasingly crucial credential market, upon which individual economic opportunity and security are based. Chapter 4 serves as a springboard for the world of public education where the promise of literacy for all is placed before us in the comprehensive education system with which we live. We are required to observe competing definitions of the educated person, where the gravity of differentiated wage labor and monopoly capitalism bends the light of reason, altering our perception of fairness in the distribution of educational goods. In this chapter we will explore the social construct of literacy. We will discuss several ways in which this term has been used in educational policy discussions, and focus on its connection to the basic themes of educational promise and real school practice. For example, during the previous national push for “excellence” in education, starting with the Nation at Risk movement in the Reagan administration, great emphasis was placed on international... Read more at location 272

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the study of literacy helps us understand particular features of schooling, for example, how schools serve some groups in society more successfully than others. Second, because literacy is affected not only by schools, but also by social processes and institutions outside the schools, the study of literacy illuminates important details of the political economy of today’s society. Social context must always be examined in judging the successes and failures of schools. Finally, the study of literacy helps us recognize the competing ideologies within our society. Different opinions prevail regarding why literacy is important, and these different views often are grounded in differing ideological perspectives. For example, recent growth of neoliberal ideology has been a challenge to the idea of free public education. It has been successful partly because it has reconstituted the notion of positive freedom by reinvigorating the classical liberal ideology of laissezfaire, negative freedom (freedom from government interference), and privileged property rights as against rights to public goods, like public education. Yet neoliberalism is a redefinition of rights. For example, the “privatization” of schooling refers not to a return of private fee schooling to replace public school. Rather it argues that private groups should have access to public funds and licensure to run public schools. These arrangements also privilege parents with the “social capital”—educational background, discretionary time, transportation options, and so on. For the neoconservatives this is a recaptured “freedom” to choose. For the critic of these changes it further restricts access to educational capital by those whose needs are the greatest. A Brief Historical Perspective Literacy often refers to general reading and writing skills. One way the concept of literacy is used, then, is to describe rates of reading and writing ability. This is difficult to quantify and may lead to differing conclusions. It is difficult to compare literacy rates in contemporary society with literacy rates in earlier times. First of all, there is lack of agreement about how to define literacy. Second, in the 18th and 19th centuries there were no widespread, systematic studies of literacy such as exist today. Available studies of early American literacy are generally based on the ability of individuals to sign their names on legal documents such as wills. By that standard, illiteracy was near zero for males in some New England communities by 1800, and it is near zero throughout the country today. The ability to produce a signature, however, leaves unanswered fundamental questions about someone’s ability to read and write. It really isn’t clear how much literacy existed in the Jeffersonian and common-school eras discussed in Part 1. Further, these studies of crude literacy, known as signature literacy, have led some researchers to conclude that the literacy rate of White males exceeded that of White females and was nearly universal in New England and the Middle Atlantic and southern regions in the 1800s. The self-reports of adults to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1850, however, indicate that White male and female signature rates were nearly equal.3 Still, some things do seem clear about literacy in the last two centuries, and they are instructive. It appears certain, for example, that people from upper social classes were more literate than those from lower social classes. Wealthier people had access to more forms of education—including schools, tutoring, and parental instruction—than did poorer people. Gender, too, was an obstacle to literacy. Because formal schooling and participation in public and commercial life were considered important primarily for men, women of the last two centuries had lower literacy rates than men.4 Ironically, however, mothers and women in “dame schools” provided the earliest literacy instruction that most children received. Racism also affected the chances of acquiring literacy. Before the Civil War, in most southern states... Read more at location 273

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customs, and ways. However, members of the Cherokee nation sought to emulate Whites by adapting themselves to White ways. They formed a governing body, schools, and a newspaper and owned African slaves. Chief Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language. Many people were taught to read, and children attended schools where they learned to read and write Cherokee. On February 21, 1828, their first newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, written in Cherokee and English, was published. Like Whites, the Cherokee viewed their newspaper as a source of information about events important to them.6 Literacy rates also varied by region in 18th- and 19thcentury America. New England, with its more urban demography and commercial base, tended to emphasize schooling and literacy more than did the South, which was more rural and almost feudal in its social order. With fewer schools, inhabitants of the western frontier were also less literate in general than people of the Northeast. It should be remembered, however, that many pre-20th-century Americans learned to read and write outside of schools, especially at home. Local community ordinances, however, could make school ing a public, not simply a personal, issue. The Massachusetts Education Act of 1789 allowed for the equal education of males and females. In addition, the law did not prevent the use of public funds to educate African Americans. Historian Stanley Schultz reports that in Boston at the beginning of the 19th century, few African American children attended school. Schultz attributed the low attendance patterns to poor economic conditions and overt acts of prejudice experienced by African American children in schools. In 1798, African American parents petitioned the school board for separate schools for their children. The request was initially rejected and later accepted by the school board. By the 1820s, however, African American parents, frustrated by the poor quality of teaching in the segregated schools, began to request that schools be reintegrated. In 1855, the governor of Massachusetts signed into law an act preventing communities from denying access to school on the basis of race or religious belief.7 Literacy and Power: Literacy as a Social Construction Literacy can be discussed as a general condition of access and ability to gain information that can be useful for the pursuit of general freedom and happiness. It can be redefined in context and evaluated according to criteria that reflect access to freedom. Simply, if as a society we value choices, do we equally value fair access to the information-gathering skills and information sources that makes choice meaningful? Past and present literacy rates are not only affected by differences in social class, race, gender, and region; they are also closely tied to social need. To be illiterate in today’s culture is to be significantly handicapped in the conduct of everyday affairs, to be so regarded and to be relegated to the “margins” of mainstream life. This was not as true in earlier centuries, when the everyday requirements for literacy were less demanding. In that predominantly agrarian society, literacy was not so essential to employment and the conduct of daily affairs. In fact, an illiterate person could be a respected and productive member of the rural community.8 Most people could not vote anyway, for example, and thus were not in that way disadvantaged by illiteracy. Although Jefferson and others considered literacy necessary to the conduct of republican government, it is important to note that in 1800 women, people of African descent, and Native Americans had no voice in government, and only a small minority consisting of White, male property owners was eligible to vote. Nor did religious life depend absolutely on literacy. Bible reading was considered essential in Protestant culture and was therefore an inducement to literacy, but people could participate in religious life without reading. Thus being illiterate in the 18th century and throughout much of the 19th did not necessarily mean being... Read more at location 274

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to the sixth or eighth grade. The emphasis in schooling was often on the development of a “good” worker and on vocational training, as Chapter 4 described. Ideological Hegemony Theory: Democracy and the Consolidation of Economic Power9 Jefferson believed that popular literacy could ensure the democratic distribution of power; however, the 20th century witnessed power flowing into business and government in ways he could not have foreseen. Especially since World War II, the complex relationship between corporate power and the mass media requires a reexamination of the relations between liberty and literacy in the United States today. Here we examine the sources of information against which individuals may test their powers of judgment regarding political and social arrangements. We also examine a powerful theory of political and social stability that challenges our notions of freedom and a “free” marketplace of ideas. The public debate that followed the Iraq war placed a focus on the availability of accurate information and the role of corporate media companies as stewards of fair, balanced information gathering and public dissemination. In 1961, two events revealed contrasting assessments of power in the United States: the publication of Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? and President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation.10 Dahl’s book was a major contribution to the pluralist school that dominated political science in this country during the 1950s. Pluralists argued that despite being governed by a very small group of decision makers, modern societies are consistent with democratic ideals so long as the governing groups represent competing political interests and are accountable by election to the general population. That this normative account of democracy described political conditions in the United States was virtually an article of faith in the pluralist camp, and Who Governs? was intended to provide empirical data to bolster that faith. It came as some surprise, then, that President Eisenhower would warn the nation in 1961 of “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” of a “military-industrial complex” under which “public policy itself could become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”11 Whereas Dahl’s work strengthened our traditional view of political power, Eisenhower’s speech echoed the leftist critique of power C. Wright Mills had advanced five years earlier in The Power Elite.12 In Mills’s analysis, which the pluralists took pains to reject, the important power in the United States was concentrated in the hands of an elitist group made up of those in leadership positions in government, the military, and the corporate establishment. For Mills, this elite was neither open to competition from other interests nor significantly accountable to the citizenry. Eisenhower was warning the nation, in effect, that Mills was closer to the Read more at location 275

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To what degree is the exercise of power in contemporary society “open”? In Who’s Running America? first published in 1976 and then revised during each subsequent presidential administration through George W. Bush, Thomas Dye agreed with Mills that power resides not primarily in individuals but in institutions.13 Dye’s approach provided a concrete look at the most powerful positions in three major sectors of American society: corporate, public interest, and government. By identifying the most powerful positions in each of the top 100 industrial corporations; the top 50 utilities, communications, and transportation companies; the top 50 banks; the top 50 insurance companies; and the top 15 investment firms, Dye found that 4,325 positions carry extraordinary influence in the corporate sector. In the public interest sector, he identified 2,705 positions in the mass media, in education, in philanthropic foundations, in the most prestigious law firms, and in civic and cultural organizations. In the government sector, Dye identified the most influential committee positions in Congress, the most powerful positions in the legislative and executive branches, and the key positions in the military for a total of 284 government positions. The total from these three sectors is 7,314 positions that, according to Dye, wield the major decision-making power in the most influential institutions in political and economic life. The influence of these institutions and of those who run them is remarkable. In Dye’s account, 100 corporations account for roughly 60 percent of all corporate revenues and all corporate assets. The latest available Census data show that there were 6 million firms with employees in 2007. For example, in 1996 over 75 percent of the nation’s industrial assets were concentrated in 100 corporations. In 1950 that percentage was 39.8. The positions in Dye’s list control over half the nation’s industrial assets; over half the utilities, banking, and transportation assets; over two-thirds of the nation’s insurance assets; over half the endowed assets in the nation’s private colleges and universities; one-third of the nation’s daily newspaper circulation; and over nine-tenths of broadcast news. In addition, these positions dominate the legal field and investments and securities, all the major standing committees in the House and Senate, the Supreme Court, and the four branches of the military. These are the positions occupied by those whom Mills called “the power elite” and whom Prewitt and Stone have more recently called “the ruling elite.” In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa found that his efforts to study the power relations in an Appalachian community required asking “not why rebellion occurs in a ‘democracy’ but why, in the face of massive inequalities, it does not.”14 It is tempting to ask similarly of U.S. society in general: If power relations are as undemocratic as elite theorists describe, why do citizens not only accept it, but also continue to think of the social order as Read more at location 276

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democratic? Answering this question raises issues that are fundamentally educational in character. If the concentration of power has been accurately portrayed by elite theorists, what are the educational consequences? First, it is necessary to miseducate a population in important ways for people to perceive a nondemocratic society as democratic, thereby sustaining unequal power relations. Second, the processes of participating in such a society are not as educational as Jefferson, Dewey, and others would have us believe. Each of these points will be treated in turn. The theory that best contributes to our understanding of how society miseducates in order to sustain nondemocratic power relations is that of ideological hegemony. The term “hegemony” refers to unequal power relationships between two or more cultures, ideologies, socioeconomic groups, and so on. Since there is no single, definitive account of ideological hegemony theory, it is regarded as one of the most suspect collections of concepts in the social sciences. Some formulations are better than others, however, and the intent of this section is to provide a coherent account of the available literature. T. Jackson Lears’s essay on cultural hegemony is an exemplary discussion, and parts of our account rely on his treatment.15 The first thing to note about hegemony theory is that, like all theories, it is an effort to explain selected facts. These general facts appear to be most relevant in contemporary society: The United States is made up of many individuals and groups with different and often conflicting interests; the social order benefits some groups far more than others in terms of health, wealth, access to positions of power, and freedom to pursue personal interests. Despite conflicting interests and differing benefits, U.S. society is a very orderly one, with stable economic, government, and social institutions and a class structure that did not change appreciably throughout the 20th century. This stable social order is maintained not at gunpoint or through threat of force but through the cooperation of its citizenry. Hegemony theorists seek to explain the basis of this cooperation as the foundation of the social world itself. A first attempt to explain hegemonic social order might be expressed this way: A small minority of U.S. citizens control the political and economic institutions that shape the civic beliefs, values, and behavior of most of the population. In contrast to traditional democratic theory, which holds that the social order is based on public consensus, ideological hegemony theory argues that the social, political, and economic institutions of this society serve a relatively small group at the expense of the majority of citizens. Hegemony theory can be summarized in four general propositions, each of which requires further development: 1. Institutional elites who share common economic and political interests control the dominant political and economic institutions of the United States. 2. Though they may disagree on particular policies or strategies, these institutional elites share a common worldview, or ideology, which reflects and justifies the organization of dominant institutions. 3. Through such institutions as the government, the workplace, the school, and the mass media, the general populace is socialized into accepting these ruling ideas. 4. Although ruling ideas do not reflect the experience of all social classes, they serve to limit discussion and debate, prevent the formation of alternative social explanations, and promote a general acceptance of the status quo. It is not possible to document all the ways in which various social institutions structure experience to legitimize the dominant ideology, but we can examine two institutions that have particularly concerned hegemony theorists: the popular media and the schools. These two institutions are particularly important to hegemony theorists because they explicitly communicate ideological perspectives to the general population. It is valuable in this regard to recall... Read more at location 277

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media merger in history. On January 10, 2000, America Online and Time Warner announced a merger in a stock swap valued at $350 billion. The Federal Trade Commission supported this merger, and saw no conflict of national interest or antitrust issues. Supporters saw nothing negative. Gerald Levin, chief executive of AOL/Time Warner predicted global media would become the dominant industry of the 21st century—so powerful that they might in fact become more powerful than governments. “So what’s going to be necessary is that we’re going to need to have corporations redefined as instruments of public service,” he said, adding, “It’s going to be forced anyhow because when you have a system that is constantly available everywhere in the world immediately, then the old-fashioned regulatory system has to give way.” Robert McChesney notes the “massive paradox” that with the explosion of information and technology, “sitting atop this golden web are a handful of media firms—exceeding by a factor of 10 the size of the largest media firms of just 15 years earlier.”17 Detractors say that media conglomerates must be most carefully regulated to ensure competition, because they define, by their production of video, audio, publishing, news and entertainment, the free marketplace. Here the freedom to pursue property rights, in the form of media holdings, lays in stark contrast to the freedom of citizens to pursue the truth from a healthy variety of sources.18 However, Robert Pitofsky, chair of the U.S. federal Trade Commission said, “Antitrust is more than economics. And I do believe that if you have issues in the newspaper business, in book publishing, news generally, entertainment, I think you want to be more careful and thorough in your investigation than if the very same problems arose in cosmetics, or lumber, or coal mining. . . . I mean, if someone monopolizes the cosmetics field, they’re going to take money out of consumers’ pockets, but the implications for democratic values are zero. On the other hand, if they monopolize books, you’re talking about implications that go way beyond what the wholesale price of books may be.”19 The Paradox of Media Property Rights and Public Information Rights: From NBC to GE to Comcast Thus the tendency toward corporate consolidation pursued, with government regulatory support, as a liberal property right, works to conflict with the citizen’s right to a free market of ideas. Thus the very economic freedom of the market moves in ways to limit freedom in the political social marketplace. As another case in point, while NBC, the National Broadcasting Company, was, until recently, an unconsolidated singular media entertainment and news company, it was owned by industrial giant General Electric. The ninth-largest corporation in the world, GE revenues are equivalent to the Gross National Product of Norway. If it were a national economy it would be larger than 130 countries.20 For example, GE benefits from its defense contracts for profit, how might this have affected balanced news coverage of military conflict? A GE website, GE in the News, reported, just prior to the outbreak of war in Iraq, “a war in Iraq could clip air traffic, which in turn would hurt the sale of spare parts by GE’s aircraftengines unit. Still, the company currently expects aerospace operating profits to jump by 5% to 10% this year, as GE benefits from cost reductions, a growing services segment and military sales.”21 GE purchased the largest Spanish-language television network and The History Channel, a prime cable network source of political and his torical interpretation. Time magazine, a center-conservative news magazine, is cited as the source of an article identifying GE as easily the most globally diversified company in the world, with increasing global market share, and the company most aggressive in increasing profits through “corporate welfare” to enable job cuts in the United States. It was an enthusiastic proponent of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and,... Read more at location 278

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completed its sale of NBC Universal, which includes all its media outlets, to media giant Comcast.This creates a media behemoth. Comcast is also the nation’s largest provider of broadband cable and Internet, controlling media across distribution platforms.24 policy that ultimately relies on the American worker to die in foreign battles to protect the interests of capitalists. The Great Recession has been in part due to consolidation in financial markets and banking, and the success of those industries to wield great influence on Congress to weaken regulations that required their activities to be transparent to the public. Critics also argued that the consolidation of news media and their alignment with corporate finance also resulted in less critical coverage of financial fraud during this period. This perspective, which has been developed by a number of scholars in the United States and abroad, is typically not made available to the American public through the news media.25 News corporations in America are, after all, capitalist institutions; their interests would be threatened if they alienated advertisers who depend on current American foreign policy for their profits. Further, many representatives of U.S. multinational corporations serve as directors of major U.S. news corporations. When Thomas Jefferson argued that daily newspapers were so essential to democratic life that he would rather see a society without government than a society without newspapers, he had no way of knowing that multinational corporations would one day control the public’s exposure to the media, and that the independent newspaper would become a species close to extinction. The most extensive treatment of this relatively recent development is The Media Monopoly, written by Ben H. Bagdikian, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Bagdikian writes: At the end of World War II . . . 80 percent of the daily newspapers in the United States were independently owned, but by 1989 the proportion was reversed, with 80 percent owned by corporate chains. In 1981 twenty corporations controlled most of the business of the country’s 11,000 magazines, but only seven years later that number had shrunk to three corporations.26 Again, for Jefferson, the notion of a “free marketplace of ideas” was predicated on a diverse array of privately owned newspapers and pamphlets with competitive points of view. Each citizen would be free to accept or reject those publications on the basis of how well his or her own interests were reflected. In a controlled marketplace of ideas, however, such choice has largely evaporated. Bagdikian notes that “in order What are the possible educational responses to the paradox of freedom in information markets? Thinking Critically about the Issues #1 Beyond NBC we must examine the informationshaping power of the corporate consolidated media. The news media outlets of these corporations report a great many negatives about American society, but these criticisms nearly always stay within clearly acceptable bounds. For example, even though criticisms often address problems faced by American institutions, they do not address problems in how those institutions are structured. The media may criticize how the game is being played, but it never questions the rules of the game itself. A few detailed examples can illustrate this point. Reports on the domestic economy of the United States often point out unemployment, job layoffs, welfare cuts, and the flight of corporations to thirdworld nations. This is presented as bad news, but the American public is given no way of understanding how such bad news is an inevitable outcome of the structure of corporate capitalism itself. A structural critique would examine how unemployment is built into our capitalist system and how it benefits capitalists by keeping workers in competition with one another for scarce jobs. Such a critique could show how the interests of corporate owners make it rational for them to sometimes act... Read more at location 279

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to have the power of rejection, the public needs real choices and choice is inoperative where there is monopoly, which is the case in 98 percent of the daily newspaper business, or market dominance of the few, which is the case with television and most other mass media.”27 In 1930 there were 132 newspapers sold daily per 100 households in the United States. By 1965 the number was reduced to 111 papers per 100 households, and in 1986 the number had declined to 72.28 Bagdikian reports that the 1982 edition of the World Press Encyclopedia ranked the United States 20th in papers sold per person, with only 272 daily papers sold per 1,000 population. This compares, for example, with 572 sold per 1,000 people in Sweden, 526 in Japan, 472 in East Germany, and 447 in Luxembourg, to cite the top four. UNESCO’s 1990 Statistical Yearbook shows that by 1990 the United States had fallen still farther behind the leading nations.29 By 2003, another 150 daily papers had disappeared from the scene in the United States. The percentage of Americans who read a daily paper declined from 62 percent in 1990 to 55 percent in 2002. In 1983, the men and women who headed the 50 mass media corporations that dominated American audiences could have fit comfortably in a modest hotel ballroom. The people heading the 20 dominant newspaper chains probably would form one conversational cluster to complain about newsprint prices; 20 magazine moguls in a different circle denounce postal rates; the broadcast network people in another corner, not being in the newspaper or magazine business, exchange indignation about government radio and television regulations; the book people compete in outrage over greed of writers’ agents; and movie people gossip about sexual achievements of their stars. By 2003, five men controlled all these old media once run by the 50 corporations of 20 years earlier. These five, owners of additional digital corporations, could fit in a generous phone booth. Granted, it would be a tight fit and it would be filled with some tensions.30 Of course, the pervasiveness of television and the Internet has contributed to the decline of newspaper circulation in the United States, but this is not encouraging news. Ownership of television stations, even when cable TV is taken into account, is more concentrated than ownership of newspapers in part because there are so few TV stations in comparison to newspapers.31 There is much more that could be written—and has been written—about the ways in which the communications media have institutionalized violations of a free marketplace of ideas. And the news media perhaps make up a smaller part of that picture than do the entertainment media. Todd Gitlin is one of several writers who have described the ways in which television programming, apparently designed for entertainment, reinforces rather than questions the dominant ideology.32 Further, it can be argued that it is not just the messages on television that affect people’s ability to think about their culture. The technology itself may have an impact on our ability to develop the literacy skills to read deeply and critically. A U.S. government study, for example, showed the following: Students who watched 3 or fewer hours of television a day showed higher levels of reading proficiency than those who watched 6 or more hours each day. In 1994, 57 percent of 4th-graders and 59 percent of 8th-graders watched 3 or fewer hours daily, while 75 percent of 12th-graders did so.33 Bagdikian’s work in 1980 was groundbreaking and provides us with a benchmark for his later work.34 Communications Technologies: From Jefferson’s “Free Marketplace of Ideas” to the “Information Marketplace” Computer technology and the World Wide Web are providing a tantalizing if sometimes troubling platform to look at literacy in this century. On one hand, the alternative press and opinion developing in numerous websites and weblogs (blogs) is one of the main challenges to the consolidation of media information power. Indeed, Danny Scheckter, executive director... Read more at location 280

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future of technology and society in the United States and the world. In this volume Dertouzos, director of the MIT Lab for Computer Science, compares the current information technology revolution with the industrial revolution in England and the technology revolution of the early 20th century: “The Industrial Revolution began in England when the steam engine was invented in the middle of the eighteenth century. . . . Technical change had largely stopped by the end of the nineteenth century when a new wave of innovations appeared: the internal combustion engine, electricity, synthetic chemicals, the automobile. . . . Both revolutions had dark sides as well as bright.” The author goes on to assert that the current “Information Revolution will trigger a similarly sweeping transformation,” which he calls “the Information Marketplace.” In 1980 he wrote this about the information marketplace: By Information Marketplace I mean the collection of people, computers, communications, software, and services that will be engaged in the intraorganizational and interpersonal information transactions of the future. These transactions will involve the processing and communication of information under the same economic motives that drive today’s traditional marketplace for material goods and services. The Information Marketplace already exists in embryonic form. Expect it to grow at a rapid rate and to affect us as importantly as have the products and processes of the industrial revolution.35 In addition to the growth of the use of computers and the Internet in society in general, concerns about access and the “digital divide” continue. According to 2005 and 2010 reports from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): • 81 (2005) and 92 percent (2010) percent of high school sophomores who were White non-Hispanic and 83 percent of Asian American sophomores used a personal computer at home at least once a week, but only 56 (2005) and 82% (2010) percent of African American and Hispanic sophomores did so. • 53.7 percent of low-income high school sophomores reported using a computer at least once a week at home, while 88 percent of high-income sophomores did so. • By 2003, 99 to 100 percent of schools in urban and rural environments alike were connected to the Internet, but student access to school computers varied with family income across all grade levels.36 Given this dramatic growth in the availability of computers and the Internet in schools and homes, we can expect to see many studies being conducted with titles similar to this one by Ronald D. Owston: “The World Wide Web: A Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning?” Owston asks, Does the Web increase access to education? Does it promote improved learning? Does it contain the costs of education? He finds that “a promising case exists for the Web in all three areas. The case is rooted largely in how educators are actually using the Web today.”37 Owston’s study illustrates the great potential of the Web but also shows that this potential is not always tapped. The Rise of Social Media Social media are a developing hybrid of technologies, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, and instant text messaging. Social media are distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film. They are relatively inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone to write, publish and access information. Our discussion of media consolidation has focused on corporate industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information. By contrast, these media are characterized by diffusion and personalized control of information, with links to the hyperexpanding world of the Internet. Beyond but including this social content media such as YouTube and Facebook have created alternative spaces for information sharing. The radical redistribution of information is still a question of platform consolidation, with increasing monopolization of the Internet search power. The promise of... Read more at location 281

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Internet-mediated knowledge production multiplying exponentially, some worry that the rise in immediacy will be paid for in a loss of social memory. Earlier media connections in a print world constituted a special kind of record that demanded attention and a logical focus from topic to topic and event to event. Hyperinformation has attracted the attention of critics who claim that social media in fact create an illusion of interpersonal connection, monopolizing time during which interpersonal relationships might otherwise develop. Some argue deterioration of language, writing and conversational skills. Still others talk about the addictions to social media that particularly affect the young during which the opportunity to develop socially and emotionally and intellectually is lost, perhaps permanently. Social media are a new challenge to our models of literacy and democracy. They have been a real presence in movements for change in the Arab world in the past several years, and in the mobilization of citizens, the power of monopoly finance in the Great Recession and foreclosure crises, and the “Occupy” movement. While you are reading this, some of your classmates are attending deeply to a world that is both intimate to their private world and connected to the most public of social spaces. Where this heads will be a part of your educational journey and legacy. Recall Dertouzos’s claim that each revolution in technology has a bright and a dark side and notice that in the data presented earlier, it is clear that some segments of society—those with greater economic resources—have greater access to new technologies in homes and schools. Dertouzos believes this is a matter of great concern, given the political economy of the United States and the influence of capitalism on the market economies of the world: With the productivity gains made possible by all the information and information tools at their disposal, the rich nations and rich people of the world will improve and expand their economic goods and services, thereby getting richer. As they get richer they will leverage the Information Marketplace even further, thereby experiencing exponentially escalating economic growth. The poor nations and poor people, by contrast, can’t even get started. . . . The painful conclusion is that, left to its own devices, the Information Marketplace will increase the gap between rich and poor countries and between rich and poor people.38 Later, Dertouzos argues: “We must help ensure that with respect to this critical gap the Information Marketplace is not ‘left to its own devices.’ ” This resolution, however, is far from easy to attain. If public or governmental intervention is being advocated, the specter of Orwell’s Big Brother is immediately raised: Do we want a strong central government to control powerful information technologies? If the government does not play a role, however, is it not inevitable that the haves will move further ahead of the have-nots in information, power, and wealth? Dertouzos recognizes that the political economy of capitalism will play a major role in the nature and distribution of technology resources. He writes that market forces will coerce national policies in some directions and not others: Already, the world is moving with giant strides in the quest for massive economic growth. The Information Marketplace is a central factor in this growth and can even be regarded as the largest potential market in the world. A nation that seeks economic growth in the global economy has no choice but to join in. Most of the control over the machinery of the Information Marketplace will be exerted by the industrially wealthy nations, which are democratic nations as well. . . . By its very definition, this control distributed in the hands of the bulk of the people who will use the Information Marketplace runs counter to centralized control by Big Brother. . . . [N]o self-respecting dictator would want it.39 George Orwell wrote in the dystopian novel 1984 of a world in which technology would be used to... Read more at location 282

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democracy and its founders are praised, a number of important details of American social history are selectively omitted. One of these is the role of conflict in producing progressive social change. Jean Anyon’s study of high school social studies texts reveals that positive social changes in civil rights, the resolution of the Vietnam War, labor unions, and the women’s movement are presented as triumphs of the legal system and of processes of discussion and bargaining. The role of disruptive protests that often involved violent repression by the police and military is ignored. The message explicitly communicated in these texts is that consensus rather than power or conflict is what makes history and leads to progress. The effectiveness of protest and militant collective action is selectively omitted. A related example is omission from history texts of the success of the Socialist party early in the 20th century. If portrayed at all, it is most often portrayed negatively, as an insignificant movement on the part of an irresponsible few.40 As Michael Apple points out, a fundamental linkage exists between the overt and implicit messages in school texts and the economics of textbook publishing itself. Some states regulate the political content of their texts, and publishers cannot afford to ignore those guidelines if they want to sell books.41 Just as schools strengthen the prevailing ideological hegemony through both their processes and their academic content, so society as a whole strengthens the prevailing ideological hegemony through the decisionmaking processes of most workplaces and through the ideology that underlies and controls the media. The decision-making processes of the great majority of workplaces, for example, are characterized by authoritarian, hierarchical structures in which workers do not participate in major decisions that affect their working lives. On the one hand, this hierarchy is legitimized by claims of talent and training on the part of superiors and by the need for efficiency in decision making. On the other hand, the resulting forms of work life are decidedly nondemocratic. This nonparticipatory experience in the workplace contrasts markedly with the prevailing political rhetoric that U.S. society is democratic. This conflict between the nondemocratic relations of daily experience and the culture’s proclamations of democracy is rarely analyzed and evaluated in popular discourse. Instead, people live with the contradictions, generally not recognizing them as such. Antonio Gramsci, an important ideological hegemony theorist, argued this position some 50 years ago, saying that the working person in a capitalist society tends to be paralyzed into passivity and inactivity by this basic contradiction between democratic political rhetoric and the daily experience of nondemocratic forms of life.42 Gramsci’s account perhaps goes a long way toward answering Gaventa’s question cited earlier: “not why rebellion occurs in a ‘democracy’ but why, in the face of massive inequalities, it does not.” If correct, the hegemony theorists’ analysis has many implications for education, two of which are fundamental. First, it appears that society is educating in deeply contradictory ways. On the one hand, citizens are taught in the schools and through the media that they live in a democratic society. On the other hand, they are taught through daily experience not to expect participation in fundamental decisions affecting their lives. Finally, they are not educated by either school or society to examine and question such contradictions between rhetoric and reality. Instead, citizens learn from an early age to tolerate the contradictions if they see them at all. It requires nothing less than indoctrination to convince people in a hegemonic, nondemocratic society that democracy is working well. If the hegemonic theorists are correct in arguing that American education contains a stiff dose of indoctrination, we should not be surprised that the most literate classes are the most convinced.43 Second,... Read more at location 283

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Contemporary Perspective on Literacy: Conventional Literacy Probably the simplest definition of “conventional” literacy is that which appears in most dictionaries: “the ability to read and write.” It is this simple form of literacy that most citizens of the United States have in mind when we think about ourselves as a highly literate nation. After all, virtually the entire population of this country has attended school, where reading and writing are taught in the earliest grades. This is exactly the reasoning employed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, which found in the 1980 census, for example, that 99.5 percent of U.S. adults Read more at location 285

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are literate.45 The Census Bureau defined literacy as “the ability to read and write a simple message in any language.” The literacy rate was determined by asking people what grade level they had completed in school and, for those who completed fewer than five grades, whether they could read. Nearly all the respondents claimed either to have finished the fifth grade or to be able to read anyway. Thus the Census Bureau concluded that only 0.5 percent of the nation’s adults are illiterate. As linguist Shirley Brice Heath notes, many scholars and policymakers have challenged the Census Bureau’s findings and its simple definition of literacy.46 First, its findings are highly suspect because they rely heavily on written questionnaires and telephone interviews. The former method is very ineffective for reaching the illiterate, and the latter method ineffective for reaching the poor, among whom illiteracy is most common. More damaging to the Census Bureau’s findings, however, is its definition of literacy. In the view of Heath and other critics of the conventional literacy perspective, even if people respond that they are able to read and write—the conventional notion of literacy—the most important questions remain unanswered. One unanswered question is what the 99.5 percent of U.S. adults are able to read and write. If, for example, they can read and write their own names, they can legitimately answer the Census Bureau in the affirmative. This standard, after all, was used to judge the literacy rates of Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. But we do not know what level of literacy is reflected in the Census Bureau’s data. The conventional literacy perspective does not focus on the vast differences in literacy that prevail among different population groups in the United States. African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, recent immigrants from Europe and elsewhere, and poor people of all ethnic backgrounds call attention to the fact that some population groups in our society are much more literate than others and that these differences greatly influence their lives. By claiming that virtually everyone in society is literate, we obscure important questions about levels of literacy among the various groups in our society and what this means in terms of social benefits and costs. In sum, the conventional literacy perspective appears to emphasize social and educational progress and obscure the social and educational inequalities that other conceptions of literacy might reveal. Functional Literacy Shifting definitions of literacy have helped obscure accurate literacy rates. In the social construction of literacy debate the term “functional literacy” has had perhaps the most discussion. In 1993 the National Center for Education Statistics redefined literacy beyond reading and writing, asked participants to complete tasks, defined an adult as someone 16 years of age or older, and scored responses in a range of literacy achievement. The definition of literacy used in the survey is illustrative of the shifting concerns about literacy. In the report, literacy was defined as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”47 This report, the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), provides useful data on 26,000 adults and will be referred to at several points in this chapter. The origin of the term “functional literacy” says something important about its nature. The term was first used by the U.S. Army during World War II to mean “the capability to understand written instructions necessary for conducting basic military functions and tasks . . . a fifthgrade reading level.” Rather than using a fixed definition of literacy such as the ability to read and write, the Army recognized that literacy needed a definition that was adjustable to particular contexts. If a recruit could read and write, but not well enough to function in the context of the written materials provided by the Army, that recruit... Read more at location 286

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well-known early effort to investigate functional literacy was conducted in the mid-1970s at the University of Texas, using an index called the adult performance level (APL).51 The APL project tested how well adults could function in 65 tasks requiring literacy skills in everyday life. From 20 to 60 percent of those tested failed to perform successfully at tasks such as writing a check that a bank would process, addressing an envelope adequately, figuring the difference in price between a new and a used appliance, making change for a purchase, matching personal qualifications to a written job application, and determining whether a paycheck was correct. The APL researchers concluded that 30 million people are “functionally incompetent” and that another 54 million “just get by.” Author Jonathan Kozol, in his acclaimed book Illiterate America, argues that approximately 60 million people cannot read well enough to understand the antidote instructions on a bottle of kitchen lye, the instructions on a federal income tax return, or the questions on a life insurance form. He writes that these 60 million people are “illiterate in terms of U.S. print media at the present time.” In other words, one-third of the adult population was functionally illiterate. The more recent NALS findings suggest that Kozol’s figures may somewhat overstate functional illiteracy in the nation today but that 40 to 44 million adults function at the lowest of the five levels of literacy identified.52 Such definitions, although leaving open what it means to “function effectively,” help raise important questions about society and education. For example, the functional literacy perspective shows how social groups differ in literacy rates, something the conventional literacy perspective obscures. The APL study, for example, suggested that now, just as in Jefferson’s time, gender affects the chances of being literate: About 23 percent of women over age 18 were identified as functionally illiterate, compared with 17 percent of men. The more recent NALS data, however, did not confirm these gender differences, except in quantitative literacy activities.53 Perhaps more disturbing were the differences in literacy among different ethnic groups. The APL study indicated that 16 percent of White people, 44 percent of Black peopl e, and 56 percent of Latinos over age 18 were functionally illiterate at that time. Although the illiteracy rate among minority youth is lower than that among adults, it is still scandalous. Limitations of the Functional Literacy Perspective The value of the functional literacy perspective is that it shows how our society educates (in terms of literacy, at least) different social groups to different degrees. There are, however, limits to this approach. As we have seen earlier, despite his own use of the functional perspective to illustrate the severe problem of illiteracy in the United States, Jonathan Kozol argues against the term “functional.” He writes, “If there is a single word we would do well to wipe away from the vocabulary of a literate society, it is the invidious modifier ‘functional.’ It is a bad word, chosen by technicians but unfortunately accepted without protest by the humanistic scholar and the pedagogic world alike.”54 Kozol’s basic objection to the functional literacy perspective is that it denotes as a goal “the competence to function at the lowest levels of mechanical performance” instead of indicating a more ambitious conception of literacy. Certainly Jefferson did not have only minimum competence in mind when he described the connections between literacy and a free society. Educator Colin Lankshear and others have added to Kozol’s criticism of the functional literacy perspective. A second limitation on this perspective, according to Lankshear, is its tendency to blame the victims of social inequality for illiteracy. The emphasis tends to fall on the personal deficiency of the illiterate person. Consequently, the concept of functional illiteracy, in practice, tends to initiate... Read more at location 287

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the minimum work levels that industry needs. Who does this benefit most, the learner or industry? Lankshear asks. Under NCLB, educators have witnessed a renewal of curricular “Taylorization.” Mechanical, scripted reading programs such as Success For All (SFA) and Reading First (RF) have increasingly deskilled the teaching of reading. Like the methods of Frederick Taylor, as we have seen, these programs disproportionately affect students and teachers in low-SES and minority schools.56 With Reading First we see an intriguing intersection between literacy, corporate influence peddling, and consolidation. In a recent case, these two giants of the reading industry, RF and SFA, battled over the curricular moral high ground. In 2007 a federal inspection of RF found evidence that program directors steered the grant-application process for the $1 billion annual initiative to ensure that particular reading programs and instructional approaches were widely used and that others were essentially left out.57 Indeed, recent studies have shown that while RF increased some functional/ basic reading skills, comprehension, the building block of advanced literacy, in fact declined. This limitation of the functional perspective becomes apparent in popular news articles on illiteracy as a threat to institutions—“The Scourge of Adult Illiteracy,” as the New York Times put it.58 Popular news stories warn that illiteracy is so high that soon “there won’t be enough people equipped to handle complex new technology” and that “these functional illiterates exact a high national price” in terms of the costs of welfare and unemployment compensation. Or, as literacy advocate Barbara Bush, mother of President George W. Bush, argued, “Most people don’t know we spend 6.6 billion dollars a year to keep 750,000 illiterates in jail. I’m trying to remind people that there’s a direct correlation between crime and illiteracy, between illiteracy and unemployment.”59 These comments emphasize that functional illiteracy is dysfunctional for society. It is a “social disease that affects us all,” proclaims an advertisement by Gulf & Western Corporation. To help people become functionally literate, from this perspective, is to indicate how they can help institutions function better. Educator Neil Postman notes in this connection that “some minimal reading skill is necessary if you are to be a ‘good citizen,’ but ‘good citizen’ here means one who can follow the instruction of those who govern him.”60 Two other perspectives on literacy have been developed in an effort to overcome the limitations of the functional perspective. The more conservative of the two has become known as cultural literacy, while the more radical may be regarded as critical or emancipatory literacy. What, in your view, does the functional literacy perspective contribute to our understanding of the political economy of literacy in the United States? If these are valuable contributions, is the functional approach an adequate view of literacy on which to base educational policy? Explain. Thinking Critically about the Issues #3 Critical Literacy Critical literacy is a multidisciplinary perspective that refocuses us on the issue of knowledge and the distribution of power in educational communities working to maintain and improve their democratic institutions and hopes. This is a refocusing on education as nurturing the ability to see what will “secure or endanger” freedom. Those who embrace the critical literacy perspective most frequently pay respect to the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose 1973 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains the most creative and influential work in critical literacy. Freire explicitly avoids making recommendations for literacy education in the United States but approves of the efforts of U.S. educators to do so. In particular, Freire cites the work of Henry Giroux, a professor of curriculum theory who has done a great deal to define the significance of Freire’s work for schooling in the United States. Giroux... Read more at location 288

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literacy, and cultural literacy—miss the essential value of literacy, which is its potential for human liberation. This is why critical literacy is sometimes referred to as emancipatory literacy. Freire and Macedo write: In our analysis, literacy becomes a meaningful construct to the degree that it is viewed as a set of practices that functions to either empower or disempower people. In the larger sense, literacy is analyzed according to whether it serves as a set of cultural practices that promotes democratic and emancipatory change.64 For critical theorists, the other three forms of literacy examined in this chapter serve primarily to support established relations of oppression and thus disempower people rather than empower them. Critical Literacy Method The first three literacy perspectives are all compatible with the teaching methods most commonly used in U.S. schools—methods that emphasize learning the skills of reading and writing and learning information about U.S. and world culture. The methods for teaching from a critical literacy perspective, however, are not so familiar. In Education under Siege, Aronowitz and Giroux provide some beginning principles on which a critical literacy pedagogy could be based: In the first instance, critical literacy would make clear the connection between knowledge and power. It would present knowledge as a social construction linked to norms and values, and it would demonstrate modes of critique that illuminate how, in some cases, knowledge serves very specific economic, political, and social interests. . . . Thus, critical literacy is linked to notions of self- and social empowerment as well as to the process of democratization. In the most general sense, critical literacy means helping students, teachers, and others learn how to read the world and their lives critically and relatedly; it means developing a deeper understanding of how knowledge gets produced, sustained, and legitimated; and most importantly, it points to forms of social action and collective struggle.65 Exactly what this might mean in terms of specific classroom practice is a matter that remains to be worked out by both theorists and teachers. Helping “students, teachers, and others learn how to read the world critically” is not something that theorists claim to know exactly how to do in the context of the United States, so they look to the achievements of Paulo Freire in Brazil and elsewhere. Instead of teaching Brazilian peasants the language and cultural information of the educated Read more at location 289

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In Theory and Resistance in Education, Henry Giroux points out that Freire’s work long ago showed how literacy has the potential not only to liberate people but to make oppressed people believe that the dominant culture is correct in portraying them as “inferior and responsible for their location in the class structure.” Giroux continues: “In this case—largely as a result of what it does not say—literacy produces powerlessness, making people voiceless and denying them the tools they need to think and act reflectively.”62 These comments illustrate several important features of the critical literacy perspective. First, critical literacy draws attention to power relations in society by focusing on oppression. Usually this oppression is defined in terms of economic and political discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or (perhaps most pervasively) social class. Second, the critical literacy perspective, unlike the other literacy perspectives examined in this chapter, particularly attends to how knowledge and power are interrelated. In modern capitalist society, as in other societies, what knowledge is of most worth is determined by those who dominate the culture’s institutions. The dominant ideology is dominant because its proponents are those people who control the social institutions. People without such class-defined knowledge, usually the poor and otherwise oppressed, are considered inferior to those in the dominant educated class. Third, for critical literacy theorists, the basis of literacy is the capacity to think and act reflectively, not the ability to read lines on a page. That is, the connection between literacy and liberty is taken so seriously in this perspective that the skill of reading words is considered less significant than the skill of “reading the world,” as Freire says. The point of critical literacy is not reading words but understanding the world—and acting to change the social relations of oppression to relations of liberation. Giroux writes: Literacy, for Freire, is a quality of human consciousness as well as the mastery of certain skills. The uniqueness of this approach is that it is situated in a critical perspective that stresses the transformation of relations between the dominated and the dominant within the boundaries of specific historical contexts and concrete cultural settings.63 Simply put, the critical literacy perspective redefines literacy as the ability to understand and act against the social relations of oppression. Because they lack an account of this combined ability to understand and to act, argue critical literacy theorists, the other forms of literacy—conventional literacy, functional Read more at location 289

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classes, Freire took as his starting point the experiences, understandings, and language of the peasants themselves. He based his pedagogy on the importance of “dialogue,” in which teacher and students educated one another with respect to their understandings of the world. The knowledge of the peasants was not regarded as inferior or inadequate but as legitimate learning that could be critically examined for its strengths and weaknesses. In particular, the dialogue took seriously the peasants’ discontent with their conditions at the bottom of the socioeconomic order and sought to develop an understanding of why those conditions prevailed. In constructing such an understanding, both teacher and students developed a greater awareness of the ways in which inequality and oppression were built into the social and economic order of Brazilian society—and they began to develop ways to change that order. In relying on Freire’s theories and practices in Brazil, Henry Giroux offers the following as an initial step toward a corresponding pedagogy in U.S. schools: The type of critical pedagogy being proposed here is fundamentally concerned with student experience; it takes the problems and needs of the students themselves as its starting point. This suggests both confirming and legitmating the knowledge and experience through which students give meaning to their lives. Most obviously, this means replacing the authoritative discourse of imposition and recitation with a voice capable of listening, retelling, and challenging the very grounds of knowledge and power. . . . It is important to stress that a critical pedagogy of literacy and voice must be attentive to the contradictory nature of student experience and voice and therefore establish the grounds whereby such experience can be interrogated and analyzed with respect to both strengths and weaknesses.66 One might legitimately ask of such an approach, “But what about reading and writing? Doesn’t critical literacy include reading and writing?” E. D. Hirsch wrote an article citing the high written and “cultural” literacy requirements in the pedagogy of hegemony theorist and critical theory avatar Antonio Gramsci.67 Indeed, Gramsci argued for a traditional curriculum and against what might have been termed a “life adjustment” curriculum, as a guard against an intellectually and politically crippled society. The most direct answer to this question is yes. The critical literacy perspective does include reading and writing, but it defines them in important new ways. Reading and writing are not perceived as a set of skills for merely functioning in existing society or as a way to become “culturally literate” but rather as a means to understand, express, and change the social relations that favor some people at the expense of others. Giroux, Kozol, Shor, and others recognize that those who are unable to read and write are easily victimized by a society that values reading and writing so highly. But mere functional literacy drill endangers the stimulation of interest and meaning, which may make schooling for marginalized children more meaningfully a promise for fair chances to advance their education, and will not in itself Read more at location 290

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prevent such victimization. For critical literacy to exist, there must be a combination of critical understandings and actions together with the ability to use the language tools of the dominant culture. Cultural Literacy: Arguments for High-Status Curriculum Recognizing the limitations of the functional literacy perspective, scholars such as de Castell, Luke, and MacLennan have called for a conception of literacy that takes into account particular cultural contexts and “the broader literacy needs for social and political practice, as determined by the needs of any truly participatory democracy.”68 This is an expansion of the meaning of literacy cited in national reports, and includes the importance of knowledge underlying the decoding process used in message decoding and interpretation. Perhaps the most prominent and influential effort to describe a conception of literacy consistent with the cultural context and democratic ideals of U.S. schools is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s, best-selling 1987 book Cultural Literacy. Hirsch deplores any conception of literacy that reflects only a technical “skills orientation” to reading. In a related article written for educators, Hirsch argues that language cannot be disentangled from the cultural knowledge and understandings that give language meaning. Thus, “if one believes in literacy, one must also believe in cultural literacy.”69 Hirsch claims that his conception of cultural literacy goes beyond the technical reading of functional literacy to embrace the democratic ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr. His critics, of course, disagree.70 Hirsch’s approach could also be described as cultural “fluency” with a focus on “acquaintanceship” with a multiplicity of persons, terms, and concepts, which Hirsch argues are indispensable to the furnishing of a cultivated or cultured mind. Critics would argue that disembodied term collections lead away from the stimulation of interest and meaning-making that is essential to the development of critical literacy. Hirsch and two colleagues—a historian and a natural scientist—compiled a 63-page categorized list of names, places, events, titles, and other items to illustrate the kinds of things with which culturally literate people should be familiar (see Exhibit 9.1). The list is an effort to reflect unexplained information that writers typically mention in everyday publications, information that “truly literate” people must bring to the act of reading. In part, this list is intended to serve as an educational checklist: Are we teaching these items in school? If not, says Hirsch, we are teaching only the mechanics of reading and writing, something far short of true literacy in his view. Cultural Literacy: Whose Interests Are Served? The cultural literacy perspective seems well suited to the educational aims of those who would return to a “knowledge-based” curriculum that emphasizes familiarity with the traditional elements of the nation’s dominant cultural perspectives. These perspectives are largely grounded in the achievements of White, male, middle-class culture, as a look at Hirsch’s list in Exhibit 9.1 reveals —and as he himself readily admits. Hirsch’s argument for the need to employ language and cultural knowledge and understandings in reading and writing suggests that there is one culture, one language, and one set of knowledge and understanding needed for a person to become culturally literate. Hirsch is by now familiar with the concern of his critics: that his list is culturally exclusive and privileges Euro-American language and perspective. His book with Joseph F. Kett and James Trefil has a response curriculum for nationalism: We know from the history of Europe that national schools can achieve high literacy “. . . for everyone in a multicultural population. France did so with a population that, up to the eighteenth century, spoke at least four different languages. . . . Viewed in a long historical perspective, it has been the school, not the home, that has been the decisive... Read more at location 291

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multicultural roots and that to know our culture deeply, we should know those diverse origins: [L]argely because of Europe’s involvement in half a millennium of trade and of empire, her economy, technology, religion, and culture are not the products only of “white” people, of Europeans and their descendants outside Europe. Take two entirely different, but representative examples: that the rebirth of European philosophy in the European Renaissance owed a great deal to the Arab scholars who had kept alive Greek classical learning during the European Dark Ages; and the idea of democracy in the United States was refashioned in part out of the contributions of African-Americans whose understanding of freedom was deepened by their understanding of the Old Testament and by their experience of racial slavery. What we are suggesting, in effect, is that we all participate, albeit from different cultural positions, in a global system of culture. That culture is increasingly less dominated by the West, less Eurocentric, if you like. And so there must be more and more people in the West, like ourselves, who are both aware of their ignorance of many of the “other” traditions and want to know more. . . . [W]e have placed some of the achievements of Western culture alongside those of many other cultures and traditions. We have done this in part because those juxtapositions enrich our understanding and appreciation of the achievements of “our” culture; Read more at location 292

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part because we think that in preparing the new generations for culture that is more global, it is essential for them to learn about William Shakespeare as they learn about Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, Murasaki Shikibu from Japan, Rabin dranath Tagore from India.72 Appiah and Gates chose an interesting method. They contacted scholars from cultures around the world, asking them for their views of the most important components of their respective cultures—components so significant that all well-educated people in a global society should know something about them. The first 10 entries reveal something about what this method yielded. The definitions of these terms range from half a column to two columns in length, but the abbreviated phrases below will give you some idea of the breadth of the entries. Abakwa, Sociedad—a secret society of African extraction based in Cuba. abangan—an Indonesian term referring to a large Javanese peasant community there. ‘Abbasid—the second major dynasty of Islamic rulers, or caliphs. ‘Abd al-Nasir, Gamal (Nasser, 1918–1970)—Egyptian political leader, one of the Arab world’s greatest 20thcentury leaders. Achebe, Chinua (1930– )—Nigerian essayist and novelist, author of Things Fall Apart. adab—Arabic term meaning “manners” and “literatur e.” adat—Arabic term for a particular system of customs and legal arrangements. Ade, King Sunny (1946– )—Nigerian musician internationally known for his dance-pop Yoruba juju music. adobe—building material made of heavy clay soil, sun-dried into bricks. Aeschylus (525–456 b.c.e.)—Greek playwright, author of oldest extant body of Greek drama, including Seven Against Thebes and Agamemnon.73 In one sense, both dictionaries of cultural literacy share in common the commitment to a notion of literacy that goes beyond the technical skill of decoding symbols into words. Each seeks a deeper understanding of ourselves and our culture’s ideals and processes. And each approach reflects an understanding that cultural literacy —in the sense of knowing a little bit about a lot of cultural concepts—is not the same as an ideal of a well-educated person. As Hirsch et al. say: We also hope and expect that no one will be willing to stop with cultural literacy as a final educational aim. Cultural literacy is a necessary but not sufficient attainment of an educated person. Cultural literacy is shallow; true education is deep. But our analysis of reading and learning suggests the paradox that broad shallow knowledge is the best route to deep knowledge.74 Some educators believe that one route to deeper knowledge is implied in the concept of critical literacy, to which we now turn. Surely the cultural literacy perspective is correct in seeking to go beyond the mechanics of reading and writing to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our society’s ideals and processes. However, the question remains: Does cultural literacy, as Hirsch advocates it, really embody the best aims of literacy? Advocates of critical literacy answer with an emphatic no. Schooling and Ideological Hegemony A number of researchers have investigated ways in which schooling socializes students into an authoritarian and unequal social order that claims allegiance to freedom and equality. So examined, the school can be seen as a status quo institution that reinforces dominant values and ideologies and teaches uncritical acceptance of the existing social order. Ideological hegemony theory suggests that it is not consent but compliance that is fostered in the schools and that both the organization and the curriculum of schools are responsible for this compliance. Hegemony theory focuses importantly on the content of school curriculum material. Students are socialized into the existing political–economic system not just by practicing it in schools but by having it portrayed in their texts as desirable and legitimate. Texts routinely praise our economic and political system and routinely criticize other systems. Likewise, texts rarely criticize our system. The first... Read more at location 293

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free market system that routinely appears in social studies textbooks, the corresponding claim that the U.S. free market economy is democratic, and the delegitimation of alternative political–economic systems. Such claims are in some measure misleading: There is no completely free market economy in the United States, and if there were, it would not necessarily be democratic. Slavery and some of the most antidemocratic abuses of immigrants, women, and children occurred in a historical period when our economy was much less regulated by government than it now is. Similarly, trumpeting the U.S. political –economic system over the systems of other nations obscures important truths. As Derek Bok has shown, citizens of the United States lag behind the citizens of most other industrialized nations in the majority of measures of quality of life.75 A critical consciousness, while of primary importance, is not enough; it must be accompanied by reading and writing skills, which have the potential to enhance personal and social liberation. Donaldo Macedo writes that the radical educator “will enable students to become literate in their culture as well as in the codes of the dominant classes.” Freire elaborates on this point by using the illustration of Black students in U.S. schools: The successful usage of the students’ cultural universe requires respect and legitimation of students’ discourse, that is, their own linguistic codes, which are different but never inferior. . . . In the case of black Americans, for example, educators must respect black English. . . . The legitimation of black English as an educational tool does not, however, preclude the need to acquire proficiency in the linguistic code of the dominant group.76 A tension clearly exists here. What balance should the critical perspective seek between criticism of the dominant culture on the one hand and learning its “linguistic code” on the other? Such tension is inherent, from the critical literacy perspective, in learning both to “read the world” critically and to “read the word,” which may be uncritical and biased. Without the critical reading of the unequal power relations that structure society, however, literacy does not realize its essential value of liberating the literate—at least in the critical literacy perspective. Contemporary curriculum theorist Cameron McCarthy is among those who argue that teachers can effectively engage students in examining how knowledge is produced and sustained in U.S. schools and the wider cultures and that such an investigation will necessarily have to consider relations of power in the wider culture.77 Teachers can think critically about curriculum and textbook use and seek participation in the widening of source material selection. They can also intervene prudently yet effectively by encouraging democratic processes in school space use and in student learning activities. In the educational reform movement of the 1980s a great many different “literacies” were advocated: functional literacy, computer literacy, civic literacy, aesthetic literacy, and so on. Each use of the term literacy focuses on a different realm of learning that its advocates wish to designate as fundamental to education as the three Rs. Using the word literacy seems to accomplish this. As a result, the term is often used to mean that which the one using it believes should be learned. Thus, the meaning of the term becomes altered in ways that serve different social and educational aims. From this perspective, one can see what kind of education is being promoted by the advocates of each kind of literacy treated in this chapter. Those who advocate functional literacy want people to function in society’s existing social and economic roles; those who promote cultural literacy want a greater understanding of the established culture; those who advocate critical literacy focus on empowering people to criticize and change political and economic oppression. There are no advocates of conventional literacy as an educational goal because it... Read more at location 294

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individuals themselves rather than in the larger social order—a social order that seems systematically to allocate illiteracy to some socioeconomic groups but not to others. Finally, if the goal is to emphasize the relationship between literacy and empowerment, the critical literacy perspective seems most valuable. It begins with the notion that power is unequally and undemocratically distributed in contemporary society; it emphasizes that those in power define their knowledge as the most worthwhile; it recognizes that traditional definitions of literacy serve the interests of those who have the greatest wealth and power, not those who have the least; and it asserts that literacy should help those with the least power understand these relationships and act to change them. Paulo Freire has long practiced such an approach to literacy in Brazil and elsewhere, but the practice of critical literacy in the United States lags behind the theory. We can evaluate the different literacy perspectives, then, by reference to various goals. It is therefore important to choose perspectives carefully. Which one, for example, is best suited to the interests of inner-city schoolchildren? An inner-city teacher or school that embraces a functional literacy perspective may be largely satisfied if all students can read at the sixth-grade level when they graduate from high school, because such students will be able to function in society. But a teacher who embraces cultural literacy might ask, “What understandings do such students have of Western civilization, of U.S. economic, social, and political institutions? Enough to participate as citizens and voters or only enough to choose the best buy at the supermarket?” And a teacher of critical literacy could ask, “And what if students did have such knowledge of historical and contemporary institutions? Whose interests would such knowledge serve: their own interests in becoming equal participants in political life or the interest of those who benefit from leaving political power and participation unequal?” Different perspectives on literacy reflect different educational aims. Teachers seeking to engage their students in a curriculum that empowers students in democracy and a pedagogy of human rights are frustrated by the recent growth of deskilling and what theorist Michael Apple has termed the conservative “restoration” of property privileges in education.78 Freire wrote an elegant book that is a signpost toward inclusive democratic literacy. Titled Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, Freire urges students to identify with their students’ struggles and nurture their voices and writing toward developing a critical literacy. The journal Rethinking Schools is an invaluable source for teachers looking for models of critical pedagogy. In just one issue Hawaiian educator Wayne Au emphasizes how critical teacher practice is possible and desirable. There the curriculum emphasizes student voices blending with the stories in curriculum. There the diversity of functional and cultural literacy are incomplete without this blend of democratic practice. He also emphasizes that critical literacy practice is a team sport. Nurturing local regional and national networks is a key element in teacher professional life.79 It is instructive at this point to reflect upon Thomas Jefferson’s view of the importance of literacy in the United States (see Chapter 2). Clearly Jefferson thought literacy was important for the everyday reading and writing, buying and selling functions that people had to do at that time. He also valued literacy for the cultural understanding it made possible; he advocated the teaching of history, for example, in the elementary grades. And Jefferson was clearly fond of the cultural achievements of civilized humanity; he valued reading the works considered classics for the pleasure of learning and enjoyment of literature. But Jefferson was not satisfied with a literacy that was restricted to everyday functioning and cultural appreciation, though he valued... Read more at location 295

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liberty. Similarly, both the cultural literacy perspective and the critical literacy perspective claim to preserve an indispensable relationship between liberty and literacy, yet they do so in different ways. The cultural literacy perspective emphasizes traditions of representative government and participation in established institutions. The critical literacy perspective asserts that when these institutions are themselves constituted undemocratically, only by developing a critical perspective on power and knowledge can literacy serve the goal of rejuvenating political and economic liberty for all citizens, not just the privileged classes. Jefferson believed he had articulated a conception of literacy that, for his own time, was consistent with democratic ideals. There is one question we may ask of each perspective on literacy examined in this chapter. To what degree is it consistent with democratic ideals in our own time and place? It is a question we may rightfully ask of any educational approach in our society and one that recurs in various forms throughout the remainder of this text. to recognize that their teaching is not just about reading, writing, ‘rithmetic, or calculus, or foreign language. It is also about imparting social and political values, whether teachers mean to do this or not. Schools don’t just teach lessons about literacy; they teach lessons about how society works, who succeeds and who does not, and why. And to an important degree, teachers can influence what kinds of social and political messages get delivered in their classrooms. As this chapter illustrates, the literal and political significance of “literacy” has changed as society has changed. Although one who could read and write a bit was considered literate in Jefferson’s era, such rudimentary literacy skills do not necessarily qualify one as literate in our time. To some extent, the definition of literacy has changed with society. The various dimensions of literacy in contemporary life are coined in such terms as functional literacy, cultural literacy, and critical literacy, all of which differ from the conventional notion of literacy as the simple ability to read and write. While there is no universal agreement on the meanings of those coined terms, each points to a different way in which literacy is embedded in social contexts. Each reminds us that different teachers can settle for, or aspire to, different levels of literacy for their students—and that teachers can communicate different expectations of literacy to different students, whether they intend to or not. The concept of functional literacy, for example, is grounded in a view of the degree of literacy that people need to function well or independently in a world pervaded by the written word. In this respect, functional literacy in one time and place may differ from functional literacy in another. A question arises regarding what it is to function well or independently. Are the skills of reading and writing, however fluently, enough to interpret written text well? Or are some kinds of background knowledge also important in the uses of functional literacy? Such a question lies at the foundation of the notion of cultural literacy, which proposes that fluent reading and writing skills alone are not adequate for interpreting written text. Embedded in all such text are cultural meanings, and the reader’s understanding Read more at location 296

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of those meanings will influence the interpretation of the text. One task of educators, in this view, is not just to teach functional literacy skills but to teach the background knowledge necessary to interpret written text in its cultural context. Thus, knowledge of history, literature, politics, science, and other dimensions of human experience is necessary to make sense of written text. As the background knowledge differs so will the reader’s interpretation of the text differ. As a teacher in any subject, knowing that students bring different backgrounds to class, should you help the students connect new learning with the necessary background knowledge? Do some students need more help with this than others? Does your philosophy guide you to give different kinds of help to different students? Advocates of critical literacy argue that any adequate conception of literacy should include a conceptual connection to human liberty. They assert that it is important for citizens to develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to reflect critically on their experiences and the power relations within their daily lives. They further argue that functional or even cultural literacy is a tool that can be used to liberate or to dominate; if literacy is to be liberating, people need to be educated to think carefully about power. The power of functional and cultural literacy to assist in dominating a population’s ways of understanding the world is illustrated by the concept of ideological hegemony, sometimes referred to as cultural hegemony. Consideration of the decisionmaking processes of modern capitalist culture suggests that while Jefferson may have been correct that a society cannot be ignorant and free, neither is education a guarantee of freedom. The popular press and other news and entertainment media, together with the schools, can inculcate ways of thinking and valuing in a population that leave gross concentrations of economic and political power in the hands of a very small minority while a society proudly proclaims itself as democratic. Nor is there strong reason to believe at this time that new communications technologies will seriously challenge the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Read more at location 297

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could be sexism, consumerism, glorification of violence, desire to win or succeed even if cheating is necessary, and so on. Good teachers know what social values they stand for, and which they stand against. How can you justify to others the fostering of values that may seek to resist certain social norms? In the public schools, a religious position is not an appropriate justification for a teacher’s choice of values. How might democratic values constitute a basis for your choices of what values to embrace, and which to reject, in your classroom? Your philosophy of education should be able to make that clear. Read more at location 298

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We are left to wonder what Jefferson would think of the role today’s schools play in the process of developing self-governing citizens. It would appear that our schools—and the kind of literacy they develop —play at least some role in helping students accept that participatory selfgovernment is no longer a realistic goal in modern society. Moreover, as Dewey pointed out, schools are only one agency of socialization, and there are many others in society. Some, like family, peer groups, and the media, may be more powerful than schools at instilling values that you as a teacher might find objectionable: among these Read more at location 298

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troduction: Revisiting Literacy Chapters 1 through 3 in this text form a particularly useful foundation for our examination of literacy. Chapter 1 begins our reflection on the relationship between education and the development of human reason. We consider the legacy of ethnic, racial, and gender exclusion from that liberal or “freeing” education that, as Aristotle characterized it, is “worthy of a free man.” We also begin our examination of property relations, which worked to limit access to this education, and the intertwined gender, race, and colonial relations, which served to justify an education for what Rousseau would call “role-playing” rather than free choices in acquiring the freedoms that Jefferson would intone as central to “the pursuit of happiness.” Chapter 2 described Thomas Jefferson’s faith in the ability of an educated populace to safeguard its liberties. In particular, Jefferson believed that the skills of reading and writing would equip people to stay informed about social, economic, and political events and thus help them recognize and protect their interests. Popular literacy was for Jefferson and other classical liberals one of the cornerstones of a free society. Our current condition has left educators to ponder the relationship between a local emphasis on access to fair education and education policy forged by national imperatives. For example, the overarching federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies have left us with challenging questions regarding rhetorical and real goals of education. Students and teachers are facing new strictures regarding the relationship between classroom time spent in search of equal educational goals or spent in search of the pedagogical recipe that will result in more correct answers on standardized tests. Critics such as the National Center for Fair & Open Testing have questioned whether this emphasis, which is purported to benchmark success, holding schools accountable for those traditionally underachieving, has paradoxically deprived those children. They argue that these students are less likely to learn higher levels of critical and creative thinking, which are essential for fair access to higher education. Read more at location 271

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One ideal of literacy is that students learn to negotiate multiple texts and prepare for democracy and its communication challenges. Under NCLB and the larger reform agenda, students most at risk for missing access to high literacy are subjected to reading programs scripted to be read by teachers. Schools and districts that adopt these reading programs are required to sign assurances that scripts will be followed to the letter. Education critic Jonathan Kozol describes a school where one of these programs, Success For All, is implemented. Consistent with scripted teaching, educational behaviors are strictly monitored. He writes: “There was, it seemed, a formal name for every cognitive event within this school: ‘Authentic Writing,’ ‘Active Listening,’ ‘Accountable Talk.’ The naming systems are allied to a re-Taylorization of curriculum. Like that earlier effort, these regimes have ‘a way of ordering cognition . . . [that] disproportionately affects low SES and minority schools.’”1 Thus, while scripted reading and regimes of order and discipline are prescribed to address the “achievement gap” between minority and middle-class students, research results show few positive effects on achievement. These techniques are more likely to be approaches in which students are only asked to respond mechanically, not creatively, nor to bring in their personal backgrounds and knowledge. Only correct recall of factual information and accuracy are emphasized. In middle-class schools where children come to school with requisite social capital to meet benchmarks, there is still in-district competition for scores, but fewer interruptions in teacher autonomy on curriculum. Meanwhile the USA Patriot Act works to increase surveillance on information outlets and library borrowing for the stated purpose of tracking terrorism. Education in the “national interest” may compete with the freedom to teach for developing a democratic appraisal of current conditions. At stake is the ideal of an edu cation that, again as Jefferson cited, enables one to identify and affect conditions that either “secure or endanger” one’s freedom. At the same time, Jefferson’s view of literacy reveals serious limitations in his social and political thought. Like his contemporaries, for example, he limited non-Whites’ access to literacy. His Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge provided for literacy for White children but not for children of African American or Native American descent. Jefferson’s classical liberal assumptions about the inherent superiority of Whites undergirded his views about literacy and political participation . Chapter 3 sends us in search of the foundations of freedom and exclusion, which continue to trouble the “public” education Mann inspired. Our public schools tantalize us with the promise of a free, fair, and humanizing universal education, while they also taunt us with the vestiges of exclusion, education for “evident and probable destinies,” blind patriotism, and inadequate fair access to the goods of an increasingly crucial credential market, upon which individual economic opportunity and security are based. Chapter 4 serves as a springboard for the world of public education where the promise of literacy for all is placed before us in the comprehensive education system with which we live. We are required to observe competing definitions of the educated person, where the gravity of differentiated wage labor and monopoly capitalism bends the light of reason, altering our perception of fairness in the distribution of educational goods. In this chapter we will explore the social construct of literacy. We will discuss several ways in which this term has been used in educational policy discussions, and focus on its connection to the basic themes of educational promise and real school practice. For example, during the previous national push for “excellence” in education, starting with the Nation at Risk movement in the Reagan administration, great emphasis was placed on international... Read more at location 272

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the study of literacy helps us understand particular features of schooling, for example, how schools serve some groups in society more successfully than others. Second, because literacy is affected not only by schools, but also by social processes and institutions outside the schools, the study of literacy illuminates important details of the political economy of today’s society. Social context must always be examined in judging the successes and failures of schools. Finally, the study of literacy helps us recognize the competing ideologies within our society. Different opinions prevail regarding why literacy is important, and these different views often are grounded in differing ideological perspectives. For example, recent growth of neoliberal ideology has been a challenge to the idea of free public education. It has been successful partly because it has reconstituted the notion of positive freedom by reinvigorating the classical liberal ideology of laissezfaire, negative freedom (freedom from government interference), and privileged property rights as against rights to public goods, like public education. Yet neoliberalism is a redefinition of rights. For example, the “privatization” of schooling refers not to a return of private fee schooling to replace public school. Rather it argues that private groups should have access to public funds and licensure to run public schools. These arrangements also privilege parents with the “social capital”—educational background, discretionary time, transportation options, and so on. For the neoconservatives this is a recaptured “freedom” to choose. For the critic of these changes it further restricts access to educational capital by those whose needs are the greatest. A Brief Historical Perspective Literacy often refers to general reading and writing skills. One way the concept of literacy is used, then, is to describe rates of reading and writing ability. This is difficult to quantify and may lead to differing conclusions. It is difficult to compare literacy rates in contemporary society with literacy rates in earlier times. First of all, there is lack of agreement about how to define literacy. Second, in the 18th and 19th centuries there were no widespread, systematic studies of literacy such as exist today. Available studies of early American literacy are generally based on the ability of individuals to sign their names on legal documents such as wills. By that standard, illiteracy was near zero for males in some New England communities by 1800, and it is near zero throughout the country today. The ability to produce a signature, however, leaves unanswered fundamental questions about someone’s ability to read and write. It really isn’t clear how much literacy existed in the Jeffersonian and common-school eras discussed in Part 1. Further, these studies of crude literacy, known as signature literacy, have led some researchers to conclude that the literacy rate of White males exceeded that of White females and was nearly universal in New England and the Middle Atlantic and southern regions in the 1800s. The self-reports of adults to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1850, however, indicate that White male and female signature rates were nearly equal.3 Still, some things do seem clear about literacy in the last two centuries, and they are instructive. It appears certain, for example, that people from upper social classes were more literate than those from lower social classes. Wealthier people had access to more forms of education—including schools, tutoring, and parental instruction—than did poorer people. Gender, too, was an obstacle to literacy. Because formal schooling and participation in public and commercial life were considered important primarily for men, women of the last two centuries had lower literacy rates than men.4 Ironically, however, mothers and women in “dame schools” provided the earliest literacy instruction that most children received. Racism also affected the chances of acquiring literacy. Before the Civil War, in most southern states... Read more at location 273

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customs, and ways. However, members of the Cherokee nation sought to emulate Whites by adapting themselves to White ways. They formed a governing body, schools, and a newspaper and owned African slaves. Chief Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language. Many people were taught to read, and children attended schools where they learned to read and write Cherokee. On February 21, 1828, their first newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, written in Cherokee and English, was published. Like Whites, the Cherokee viewed their newspaper as a source of information about events important to them.6 Literacy rates also varied by region in 18th- and 19thcentury America. New England, with its more urban demography and commercial base, tended to emphasize schooling and literacy more than did the South, which was more rural and almost feudal in its social order. With fewer schools, inhabitants of the western frontier were also less literate in general than people of the Northeast. It should be remembered, however, that many pre-20th-century Americans learned to read and write outside of schools, especially at home. Local community ordinances, however, could make school ing a public, not simply a personal, issue. The Massachusetts Education Act of 1789 allowed for the equal education of males and females. In addition, the law did not prevent the use of public funds to educate African Americans. Historian Stanley Schultz reports that in Boston at the beginning of the 19th century, few African American children attended school. Schultz attributed the low attendance patterns to poor economic conditions and overt acts of prejudice experienced by African American children in schools. In 1798, African American parents petitioned the school board for separate schools for their children. The request was initially rejected and later accepted by the school board. By the 1820s, however, African American parents, frustrated by the poor quality of teaching in the segregated schools, began to request that schools be reintegrated. In 1855, the governor of Massachusetts signed into law an act preventing communities from denying access to school on the basis of race or religious belief.7 Literacy and Power: Literacy as a Social Construction Literacy can be discussed as a general condition of access and ability to gain information that can be useful for the pursuit of general freedom and happiness. It can be redefined in context and evaluated according to criteria that reflect access to freedom. Simply, if as a society we value choices, do we equally value fair access to the information-gathering skills and information sources that makes choice meaningful? Past and present literacy rates are not only affected by differences in social class, race, gender, and region; they are also closely tied to social need. To be illiterate in today’s culture is to be significantly handicapped in the conduct of everyday affairs, to be so regarded and to be relegated to the “margins” of mainstream life. This was not as true in earlier centuries, when the everyday requirements for literacy were less demanding. In that predominantly agrarian society, literacy was not so essential to employment and the conduct of daily affairs. In fact, an illiterate person could be a respected and productive member of the rural community.8 Most people could not vote anyway, for example, and thus were not in that way disadvantaged by illiteracy. Although Jefferson and others considered literacy necessary to the conduct of republican government, it is important to note that in 1800 women, people of African descent, and Native Americans had no voice in government, and only a small minority consisting of White, male property owners was eligible to vote. Nor did religious life depend absolutely on literacy. Bible reading was considered essential in Protestant culture and was therefore an inducement to literacy, but people could participate in religious life without reading. Thus being illiterate in the 18th century and throughout much of the 19th did not necessarily mean being... Read more at location 274

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to the sixth or eighth grade. The emphasis in schooling was often on the development of a “good” worker and on vocational training, as Chapter 4 described. Ideological Hegemony Theory: Democracy and the Consolidation of Economic Power9 Jefferson believed that popular literacy could ensure the democratic distribution of power; however, the 20th century witnessed power flowing into business and government in ways he could not have foreseen. Especially since World War II, the complex relationship between corporate power and the mass media requires a reexamination of the relations between liberty and literacy in the United States today. Here we examine the sources of information against which individuals may test their powers of judgment regarding political and social arrangements. We also examine a powerful theory of political and social stability that challenges our notions of freedom and a “free” marketplace of ideas. The public debate that followed the Iraq war placed a focus on the availability of accurate information and the role of corporate media companies as stewards of fair, balanced information gathering and public dissemination. In 1961, two events revealed contrasting assessments of power in the United States: the publication of Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? and President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation.10 Dahl’s book was a major contribution to the pluralist school that dominated political science in this country during the 1950s. Pluralists argued that despite being governed by a very small group of decision makers, modern societies are consistent with democratic ideals so long as the governing groups represent competing political interests and are accountable by election to the general population. That this normative account of democracy described political conditions in the United States was virtually an article of faith in the pluralist camp, and Who Governs? was intended to provide empirical data to bolster that faith. It came as some surprise, then, that President Eisenhower would warn the nation in 1961 of “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” of a “military-industrial complex” under which “public policy itself could become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”11 Whereas Dahl’s work strengthened our traditional view of political power, Eisenhower’s speech echoed the leftist critique of power C. Wright Mills had advanced five years earlier in The Power Elite.12 In Mills’s analysis, which the pluralists took pains to reject, the important power in the United States was concentrated in the hands of an elitist group made up of those in leadership positions in government, the military, and the corporate establishment. For Mills, this elite was neither open to competition from other interests nor significantly accountable to the citizenry. Eisenhower was warning the nation, in effect, that Mills was closer to the Read more at location 275

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To what degree is the exercise of power in contemporary society “open”? In Who’s Running America? first published in 1976 and then revised during each subsequent presidential administration through George W. Bush, Thomas Dye agreed with Mills that power resides not primarily in individuals but in institutions.13 Dye’s approach provided a concrete look at the most powerful positions in three major sectors of American society: corporate, public interest, and government. By identifying the most powerful positions in each of the top 100 industrial corporations; the top 50 utilities, communications, and transportation companies; the top 50 banks; the top 50 insurance companies; and the top 15 investment firms, Dye found that 4,325 positions carry extraordinary influence in the corporate sector. In the public interest sector, he identified 2,705 positions in the mass media, in education, in philanthropic foundations, in the most prestigious law firms, and in civic and cultural organizations. In the government sector, Dye identified the most influential committee positions in Congress, the most powerful positions in the legislative and executive branches, and the key positions in the military for a total of 284 government positions. The total from these three sectors is 7,314 positions that, according to Dye, wield the major decision-making power in the most influential institutions in political and economic life. The influence of these institutions and of those who run them is remarkable. In Dye’s account, 100 corporations account for roughly 60 percent of all corporate revenues and all corporate assets. The latest available Census data show that there were 6 million firms with employees in 2007. For example, in 1996 over 75 percent of the nation’s industrial assets were concentrated in 100 corporations. In 1950 that percentage was 39.8. The positions in Dye’s list control over half the nation’s industrial assets; over half the utilities, banking, and transportation assets; over two-thirds of the nation’s insurance assets; over half the endowed assets in the nation’s private colleges and universities; one-third of the nation’s daily newspaper circulation; and over nine-tenths of broadcast news. In addition, these positions dominate the legal field and investments and securities, all the major standing committees in the House and Senate, the Supreme Court, and the four branches of the military. These are the positions occupied by those whom Mills called “the power elite” and whom Prewitt and Stone have more recently called “the ruling elite.” In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa found that his efforts to study the power relations in an Appalachian community required asking “not why rebellion occurs in a ‘democracy’ but why, in the face of massive inequalities, it does not.”14 It is tempting to ask similarly of U.S. society in general: If power relations are as undemocratic as elite theorists describe, why do citizens not only accept it, but also continue to think of the social order as Read more at location 276

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democratic? Answering this question raises issues that are fundamentally educational in character. If the concentration of power has been accurately portrayed by elite theorists, what are the educational consequences? First, it is necessary to miseducate a population in important ways for people to perceive a nondemocratic society as democratic, thereby sustaining unequal power relations. Second, the processes of participating in such a society are not as educational as Jefferson, Dewey, and others would have us believe. Each of these points will be treated in turn. The theory that best contributes to our understanding of how society miseducates in order to sustain nondemocratic power relations is that of ideological hegemony. The term “hegemony” refers to unequal power relationships between two or more cultures, ideologies, socioeconomic groups, and so on. Since there is no single, definitive account of ideological hegemony theory, it is regarded as one of the most suspect collections of concepts in the social sciences. Some formulations are better than others, however, and the intent of this section is to provide a coherent account of the available literature. T. Jackson Lears’s essay on cultural hegemony is an exemplary discussion, and parts of our account rely on his treatment.15 The first thing to note about hegemony theory is that, like all theories, it is an effort to explain selected facts. These general facts appear to be most relevant in contemporary society: The United States is made up of many individuals and groups with different and often conflicting interests; the social order benefits some groups far more than others in terms of health, wealth, access to positions of power, and freedom to pursue personal interests. Despite conflicting interests and differing benefits, U.S. society is a very orderly one, with stable economic, government, and social institutions and a class structure that did not change appreciably throughout the 20th century. This stable social order is maintained not at gunpoint or through threat of force but through the cooperation of its citizenry. Hegemony theorists seek to explain the basis of this cooperation as the foundation of the social world itself. A first attempt to explain hegemonic social order might be expressed this way: A small minority of U.S. citizens control the political and economic institutions that shape the civic beliefs, values, and behavior of most of the population. In contrast to traditional democratic theory, which holds that the social order is based on public consensus, ideological hegemony theory argues that the social, political, and economic institutions of this society serve a relatively small group at the expense of the majority of citizens. Hegemony theory can be summarized in four general propositions, each of which requires further development: 1. Institutional elites who share common economic and political interests control the dominant political and economic institutions of the United States. 2. Though they may disagree on particular policies or strategies, these institutional elites share a common worldview, or ideology, which reflects and justifies the organization of dominant institutions. 3. Through such institutions as the government, the workplace, the school, and the mass media, the general populace is socialized into accepting these ruling ideas. 4. Although ruling ideas do not reflect the experience of all social classes, they serve to limit discussion and debate, prevent the formation of alternative social explanations, and promote a general acceptance of the status quo. It is not possible to document all the ways in which various social institutions structure experience to legitimize the dominant ideology, but we can examine two institutions that have particularly concerned hegemony theorists: the popular media and the schools. These two institutions are particularly important to hegemony theorists because they explicitly communicate ideological perspectives to the general population. It is valuable in this regard to recall... Read more at location 277

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media merger in history. On January 10, 2000, America Online and Time Warner announced a merger in a stock swap valued at $350 billion. The Federal Trade Commission supported this merger, and saw no conflict of national interest or antitrust issues. Supporters saw nothing negative. Gerald Levin, chief executive of AOL/Time Warner predicted global media would become the dominant industry of the 21st century—so powerful that they might in fact become more powerful than governments. “So what’s going to be necessary is that we’re going to need to have corporations redefined as instruments of public service,” he said, adding, “It’s going to be forced anyhow because when you have a system that is constantly available everywhere in the world immediately, then the old-fashioned regulatory system has to give way.” Robert McChesney notes the “massive paradox” that with the explosion of information and technology, “sitting atop this golden web are a handful of media firms—exceeding by a factor of 10 the size of the largest media firms of just 15 years earlier.”17 Detractors say that media conglomerates must be most carefully regulated to ensure competition, because they define, by their production of video, audio, publishing, news and entertainment, the free marketplace. Here the freedom to pursue property rights, in the form of media holdings, lays in stark contrast to the freedom of citizens to pursue the truth from a healthy variety of sources.18 However, Robert Pitofsky, chair of the U.S. federal Trade Commission said, “Antitrust is more than economics. And I do believe that if you have issues in the newspaper business, in book publishing, news generally, entertainment, I think you want to be more careful and thorough in your investigation than if the very same problems arose in cosmetics, or lumber, or coal mining. . . . I mean, if someone monopolizes the cosmetics field, they’re going to take money out of consumers’ pockets, but the implications for democratic values are zero. On the other hand, if they monopolize books, you’re talking about implications that go way beyond what the wholesale price of books may be.”19 The Paradox of Media Property Rights and Public Information Rights: From NBC to GE to Comcast Thus the tendency toward corporate consolidation pursued, with government regulatory support, as a liberal property right, works to conflict with the citizen’s right to a free market of ideas. Thus the very economic freedom of the market moves in ways to limit freedom in the political social marketplace. As another case in point, while NBC, the National Broadcasting Company, was, until recently, an unconsolidated singular media entertainment and news company, it was owned by industrial giant General Electric. The ninth-largest corporation in the world, GE revenues are equivalent to the Gross National Product of Norway. If it were a national economy it would be larger than 130 countries.20 For example, GE benefits from its defense contracts for profit, how might this have affected balanced news coverage of military conflict? A GE website, GE in the News, reported, just prior to the outbreak of war in Iraq, “a war in Iraq could clip air traffic, which in turn would hurt the sale of spare parts by GE’s aircraftengines unit. Still, the company currently expects aerospace operating profits to jump by 5% to 10% this year, as GE benefits from cost reductions, a growing services segment and military sales.”21 GE purchased the largest Spanish-language television network and The History Channel, a prime cable network source of political and his torical interpretation. Time magazine, a center-conservative news magazine, is cited as the source of an article identifying GE as easily the most globally diversified company in the world, with increasing global market share, and the company most aggressive in increasing profits through “corporate welfare” to enable job cuts in the United States. It was an enthusiastic proponent of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and,... Read more at location 278

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completed its sale of NBC Universal, which includes all its media outlets, to media giant Comcast.This creates a media behemoth. Comcast is also the nation’s largest provider of broadband cable and Internet, controlling media across distribution platforms.24 policy that ultimately relies on the American worker to die in foreign battles to protect the interests of capitalists. The Great Recession has been in part due to consolidation in financial markets and banking, and the success of those industries to wield great influence on Congress to weaken regulations that required their activities to be transparent to the public. Critics also argued that the consolidation of news media and their alignment with corporate finance also resulted in less critical coverage of financial fraud during this period. This perspective, which has been developed by a number of scholars in the United States and abroad, is typically not made available to the American public through the news media.25 News corporations in America are, after all, capitalist institutions; their interests would be threatened if they alienated advertisers who depend on current American foreign policy for their profits. Further, many representatives of U.S. multinational corporations serve as directors of major U.S. news corporations. When Thomas Jefferson argued that daily newspapers were so essential to democratic life that he would rather see a society without government than a society without newspapers, he had no way of knowing that multinational corporations would one day control the public’s exposure to the media, and that the independent newspaper would become a species close to extinction. The most extensive treatment of this relatively recent development is The Media Monopoly, written by Ben H. Bagdikian, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Bagdikian writes: At the end of World War II . . . 80 percent of the daily newspapers in the United States were independently owned, but by 1989 the proportion was reversed, with 80 percent owned by corporate chains. In 1981 twenty corporations controlled most of the business of the country’s 11,000 magazines, but only seven years later that number had shrunk to three corporations.26 Again, for Jefferson, the notion of a “free marketplace of ideas” was predicated on a diverse array of privately owned newspapers and pamphlets with competitive points of view. Each citizen would be free to accept or reject those publications on the basis of how well his or her own interests were reflected. In a controlled marketplace of ideas, however, such choice has largely evaporated. Bagdikian notes that “in order What are the possible educational responses to the paradox of freedom in information markets? Thinking Critically about the Issues #1 Beyond NBC we must examine the informationshaping power of the corporate consolidated media. The news media outlets of these corporations report a great many negatives about American society, but these criticisms nearly always stay within clearly acceptable bounds. For example, even though criticisms often address problems faced by American institutions, they do not address problems in how those institutions are structured. The media may criticize how the game is being played, but it never questions the rules of the game itself. A few detailed examples can illustrate this point. Reports on the domestic economy of the United States often point out unemployment, job layoffs, welfare cuts, and the flight of corporations to thirdworld nations. This is presented as bad news, but the American public is given no way of understanding how such bad news is an inevitable outcome of the structure of corporate capitalism itself. A structural critique would examine how unemployment is built into our capitalist system and how it benefits capitalists by keeping workers in competition with one another for scarce jobs. Such a critique could show how the interests of corporate owners make it rational for them to sometimes act... Read more at location 279

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to have the power of rejection, the public needs real choices and choice is inoperative where there is monopoly, which is the case in 98 percent of the daily newspaper business, or market dominance of the few, which is the case with television and most other mass media.”27 In 1930 there were 132 newspapers sold daily per 100 households in the United States. By 1965 the number was reduced to 111 papers per 100 households, and in 1986 the number had declined to 72.28 Bagdikian reports that the 1982 edition of the World Press Encyclopedia ranked the United States 20th in papers sold per person, with only 272 daily papers sold per 1,000 population. This compares, for example, with 572 sold per 1,000 people in Sweden, 526 in Japan, 472 in East Germany, and 447 in Luxembourg, to cite the top four. UNESCO’s 1990 Statistical Yearbook shows that by 1990 the United States had fallen still farther behind the leading nations.29 By 2003, another 150 daily papers had disappeared from the scene in the United States. The percentage of Americans who read a daily paper declined from 62 percent in 1990 to 55 percent in 2002. In 1983, the men and women who headed the 50 mass media corporations that dominated American audiences could have fit comfortably in a modest hotel ballroom. The people heading the 20 dominant newspaper chains probably would form one conversational cluster to complain about newsprint prices; 20 magazine moguls in a different circle denounce postal rates; the broadcast network people in another corner, not being in the newspaper or magazine business, exchange indignation about government radio and television regulations; the book people compete in outrage over greed of writers’ agents; and movie people gossip about sexual achievements of their stars. By 2003, five men controlled all these old media once run by the 50 corporations of 20 years earlier. These five, owners of additional digital corporations, could fit in a generous phone booth. Granted, it would be a tight fit and it would be filled with some tensions.30 Of course, the pervasiveness of television and the Internet has contributed to the decline of newspaper circulation in the United States, but this is not encouraging news. Ownership of television stations, even when cable TV is taken into account, is more concentrated than ownership of newspapers in part because there are so few TV stations in comparison to newspapers.31 There is much more that could be written—and has been written—about the ways in which the communications media have institutionalized violations of a free marketplace of ideas. And the news media perhaps make up a smaller part of that picture than do the entertainment media. Todd Gitlin is one of several writers who have described the ways in which television programming, apparently designed for entertainment, reinforces rather than questions the dominant ideology.32 Further, it can be argued that it is not just the messages on television that affect people’s ability to think about their culture. The technology itself may have an impact on our ability to develop the literacy skills to read deeply and critically. A U.S. government study, for example, showed the following: Students who watched 3 or fewer hours of television a day showed higher levels of reading proficiency than those who watched 6 or more hours each day. In 1994, 57 percent of 4th-graders and 59 percent of 8th-graders watched 3 or fewer hours daily, while 75 percent of 12th-graders did so.33 Bagdikian’s work in 1980 was groundbreaking and provides us with a benchmark for his later work.34 Communications Technologies: From Jefferson’s “Free Marketplace of Ideas” to the “Information Marketplace” Computer technology and the World Wide Web are providing a tantalizing if sometimes troubling platform to look at literacy in this century. On one hand, the alternative press and opinion developing in numerous websites and weblogs (blogs) is one of the main challenges to the consolidation of media information power. Indeed, Danny Scheckter, executive director... Read more at location 280

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future of technology and society in the United States and the world. In this volume Dertouzos, director of the MIT Lab for Computer Science, compares the current information technology revolution with the industrial revolution in England and the technology revolution of the early 20th century: “The Industrial Revolution began in England when the steam engine was invented in the middle of the eighteenth century. . . . Technical change had largely stopped by the end of the nineteenth century when a new wave of innovations appeared: the internal combustion engine, electricity, synthetic chemicals, the automobile. . . . Both revolutions had dark sides as well as bright.” The author goes on to assert that the current “Information Revolution will trigger a similarly sweeping transformation,” which he calls “the Information Marketplace.” In 1980 he wrote this about the information marketplace: By Information Marketplace I mean the collection of people, computers, communications, software, and services that will be engaged in the intraorganizational and interpersonal information transactions of the future. These transactions will involve the processing and communication of information under the same economic motives that drive today’s traditional marketplace for material goods and services. The Information Marketplace already exists in embryonic form. Expect it to grow at a rapid rate and to affect us as importantly as have the products and processes of the industrial revolution.35 In addition to the growth of the use of computers and the Internet in society in general, concerns about access and the “digital divide” continue. According to 2005 and 2010 reports from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): • 81 (2005) and 92 percent (2010) percent of high school sophomores who were White non-Hispanic and 83 percent of Asian American sophomores used a personal computer at home at least once a week, but only 56 (2005) and 82% (2010) percent of African American and Hispanic sophomores did so. • 53.7 percent of low-income high school sophomores reported using a computer at least once a week at home, while 88 percent of high-income sophomores did so. • By 2003, 99 to 100 percent of schools in urban and rural environments alike were connected to the Internet, but student access to school computers varied with family income across all grade levels.36 Given this dramatic growth in the availability of computers and the Internet in schools and homes, we can expect to see many studies being conducted with titles similar to this one by Ronald D. Owston: “The World Wide Web: A Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning?” Owston asks, Does the Web increase access to education? Does it promote improved learning? Does it contain the costs of education? He finds that “a promising case exists for the Web in all three areas. The case is rooted largely in how educators are actually using the Web today.”37 Owston’s study illustrates the great potential of the Web but also shows that this potential is not always tapped. The Rise of Social Media Social media are a developing hybrid of technologies, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, and instant text messaging. Social media are distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film. They are relatively inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone to write, publish and access information. Our discussion of media consolidation has focused on corporate industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information. By contrast, these media are characterized by diffusion and personalized control of information, with links to the hyperexpanding world of the Internet. Beyond but including this social content media such as YouTube and Facebook have created alternative spaces for information sharing. The radical redistribution of information is still a question of platform consolidation, with increasing monopolization of the Internet search power. The promise of... Read more at location 281

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Internet-mediated knowledge production multiplying exponentially, some worry that the rise in immediacy will be paid for in a loss of social memory. Earlier media connections in a print world constituted a special kind of record that demanded attention and a logical focus from topic to topic and event to event. Hyperinformation has attracted the attention of critics who claim that social media in fact create an illusion of interpersonal connection, monopolizing time during which interpersonal relationships might otherwise develop. Some argue deterioration of language, writing and conversational skills. Still others talk about the addictions to social media that particularly affect the young during which the opportunity to develop socially and emotionally and intellectually is lost, perhaps permanently. Social media are a new challenge to our models of literacy and democracy. They have been a real presence in movements for change in the Arab world in the past several years, and in the mobilization of citizens, the power of monopoly finance in the Great Recession and foreclosure crises, and the “Occupy” movement. While you are reading this, some of your classmates are attending deeply to a world that is both intimate to their private world and connected to the most public of social spaces. Where this heads will be a part of your educational journey and legacy. Recall Dertouzos’s claim that each revolution in technology has a bright and a dark side and notice that in the data presented earlier, it is clear that some segments of society—those with greater economic resources—have greater access to new technologies in homes and schools. Dertouzos believes this is a matter of great concern, given the political economy of the United States and the influence of capitalism on the market economies of the world: With the productivity gains made possible by all the information and information tools at their disposal, the rich nations and rich people of the world will improve and expand their economic goods and services, thereby getting richer. As they get richer they will leverage the Information Marketplace even further, thereby experiencing exponentially escalating economic growth. The poor nations and poor people, by contrast, can’t even get started. . . . The painful conclusion is that, left to its own devices, the Information Marketplace will increase the gap between rich and poor countries and between rich and poor people.38 Later, Dertouzos argues: “We must help ensure that with respect to this critical gap the Information Marketplace is not ‘left to its own devices.’ ” This resolution, however, is far from easy to attain. If public or governmental intervention is being advocated, the specter of Orwell’s Big Brother is immediately raised: Do we want a strong central government to control powerful information technologies? If the government does not play a role, however, is it not inevitable that the haves will move further ahead of the have-nots in information, power, and wealth? Dertouzos recognizes that the political economy of capitalism will play a major role in the nature and distribution of technology resources. He writes that market forces will coerce national policies in some directions and not others: Already, the world is moving with giant strides in the quest for massive economic growth. The Information Marketplace is a central factor in this growth and can even be regarded as the largest potential market in the world. A nation that seeks economic growth in the global economy has no choice but to join in. Most of the control over the machinery of the Information Marketplace will be exerted by the industrially wealthy nations, which are democratic nations as well. . . . By its very definition, this control distributed in the hands of the bulk of the people who will use the Information Marketplace runs counter to centralized control by Big Brother. . . . [N]o self-respecting dictator would want it.39 George Orwell wrote in the dystopian novel 1984 of a world in which technology would be used to... Read more at location 282

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democracy and its founders are praised, a number of important details of American social history are selectively omitted. One of these is the role of conflict in producing progressive social change. Jean Anyon’s study of high school social studies texts reveals that positive social changes in civil rights, the resolution of the Vietnam War, labor unions, and the women’s movement are presented as triumphs of the legal system and of processes of discussion and bargaining. The role of disruptive protests that often involved violent repression by the police and military is ignored. The message explicitly communicated in these texts is that consensus rather than power or conflict is what makes history and leads to progress. The effectiveness of protest and militant collective action is selectively omitted. A related example is omission from history texts of the success of the Socialist party early in the 20th century. If portrayed at all, it is most often portrayed negatively, as an insignificant movement on the part of an irresponsible few.40 As Michael Apple points out, a fundamental linkage exists between the overt and implicit messages in school texts and the economics of textbook publishing itself. Some states regulate the political content of their texts, and publishers cannot afford to ignore those guidelines if they want to sell books.41 Just as schools strengthen the prevailing ideological hegemony through both their processes and their academic content, so society as a whole strengthens the prevailing ideological hegemony through the decisionmaking processes of most workplaces and through the ideology that underlies and controls the media. The decision-making processes of the great majority of workplaces, for example, are characterized by authoritarian, hierarchical structures in which workers do not participate in major decisions that affect their working lives. On the one hand, this hierarchy is legitimized by claims of talent and training on the part of superiors and by the need for efficiency in decision making. On the other hand, the resulting forms of work life are decidedly nondemocratic. This nonparticipatory experience in the workplace contrasts markedly with the prevailing political rhetoric that U.S. society is democratic. This conflict between the nondemocratic relations of daily experience and the culture’s proclamations of democracy is rarely analyzed and evaluated in popular discourse. Instead, people live with the contradictions, generally not recognizing them as such. Antonio Gramsci, an important ideological hegemony theorist, argued this position some 50 years ago, saying that the working person in a capitalist society tends to be paralyzed into passivity and inactivity by this basic contradiction between democratic political rhetoric and the daily experience of nondemocratic forms of life.42 Gramsci’s account perhaps goes a long way toward answering Gaventa’s question cited earlier: “not why rebellion occurs in a ‘democracy’ but why, in the face of massive inequalities, it does not.” If correct, the hegemony theorists’ analysis has many implications for education, two of which are fundamental. First, it appears that society is educating in deeply contradictory ways. On the one hand, citizens are taught in the schools and through the media that they live in a democratic society. On the other hand, they are taught through daily experience not to expect participation in fundamental decisions affecting their lives. Finally, they are not educated by either school or society to examine and question such contradictions between rhetoric and reality. Instead, citizens learn from an early age to tolerate the contradictions if they see them at all. It requires nothing less than indoctrination to convince people in a hegemonic, nondemocratic society that democracy is working well. If the hegemonic theorists are correct in arguing that American education contains a stiff dose of indoctrination, we should not be surprised that the most literate classes are the most convinced.43 Second,... Read more at location 283

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Contemporary Perspective on Literacy: Conventional Literacy Probably the simplest definition of “conventional” literacy is that which appears in most dictionaries: “the ability to read and write.” It is this simple form of literacy that most citizens of the United States have in mind when we think about ourselves as a highly literate nation. After all, virtually the entire population of this country has attended school, where reading and writing are taught in the earliest grades. This is exactly the reasoning employed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, which found in the 1980 census, for example, that 99.5 percent of U.S. adults Read more at location 285

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are literate.45 The Census Bureau defined literacy as “the ability to read and write a simple message in any language.” The literacy rate was determined by asking people what grade level they had completed in school and, for those who completed fewer than five grades, whether they could read. Nearly all the respondents claimed either to have finished the fifth grade or to be able to read anyway. Thus the Census Bureau concluded that only 0.5 percent of the nation’s adults are illiterate. As linguist Shirley Brice Heath notes, many scholars and policymakers have challenged the Census Bureau’s findings and its simple definition of literacy.46 First, its findings are highly suspect because they rely heavily on written questionnaires and telephone interviews. The former method is very ineffective for reaching the illiterate, and the latter method ineffective for reaching the poor, among whom illiteracy is most common. More damaging to the Census Bureau’s findings, however, is its definition of literacy. In the view of Heath and other critics of the conventional literacy perspective, even if people respond that they are able to read and write—the conventional notion of literacy—the most important questions remain unanswered. One unanswered question is what the 99.5 percent of U.S. adults are able to read and write. If, for example, they can read and write their own names, they can legitimately answer the Census Bureau in the affirmative. This standard, after all, was used to judge the literacy rates of Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. But we do not know what level of literacy is reflected in the Census Bureau’s data. The conventional literacy perspective does not focus on the vast differences in literacy that prevail among different population groups in the United States. African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, recent immigrants from Europe and elsewhere, and poor people of all ethnic backgrounds call attention to the fact that some population groups in our society are much more literate than others and that these differences greatly influence their lives. By claiming that virtually everyone in society is literate, we obscure important questions about levels of literacy among the various groups in our society and what this means in terms of social benefits and costs. In sum, the conventional literacy perspective appears to emphasize social and educational progress and obscure the social and educational inequalities that other conceptions of literacy might reveal. Functional Literacy Shifting definitions of literacy have helped obscure accurate literacy rates. In the social construction of literacy debate the term “functional literacy” has had perhaps the most discussion. In 1993 the National Center for Education Statistics redefined literacy beyond reading and writing, asked participants to complete tasks, defined an adult as someone 16 years of age or older, and scored responses in a range of literacy achievement. The definition of literacy used in the survey is illustrative of the shifting concerns about literacy. In the report, literacy was defined as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”47 This report, the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), provides useful data on 26,000 adults and will be referred to at several points in this chapter. The origin of the term “functional literacy” says something important about its nature. The term was first used by the U.S. Army during World War II to mean “the capability to understand written instructions necessary for conducting basic military functions and tasks . . . a fifthgrade reading level.” Rather than using a fixed definition of literacy such as the ability to read and write, the Army recognized that literacy needed a definition that was adjustable to particular contexts. If a recruit could read and write, but not well enough to function in the context of the written materials provided by the Army, that recruit... Read more at location 286

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well-known early effort to investigate functional literacy was conducted in the mid-1970s at the University of Texas, using an index called the adult performance level (APL).51 The APL project tested how well adults could function in 65 tasks requiring literacy skills in everyday life. From 20 to 60 percent of those tested failed to perform successfully at tasks such as writing a check that a bank would process, addressing an envelope adequately, figuring the difference in price between a new and a used appliance, making change for a purchase, matching personal qualifications to a written job application, and determining whether a paycheck was correct. The APL researchers concluded that 30 million people are “functionally incompetent” and that another 54 million “just get by.” Author Jonathan Kozol, in his acclaimed book Illiterate America, argues that approximately 60 million people cannot read well enough to understand the antidote instructions on a bottle of kitchen lye, the instructions on a federal income tax return, or the questions on a life insurance form. He writes that these 60 million people are “illiterate in terms of U.S. print media at the present time.” In other words, one-third of the adult population was functionally illiterate. The more recent NALS findings suggest that Kozol’s figures may somewhat overstate functional illiteracy in the nation today but that 40 to 44 million adults function at the lowest of the five levels of literacy identified.52 Such definitions, although leaving open what it means to “function effectively,” help raise important questions about society and education. For example, the functional literacy perspective shows how social groups differ in literacy rates, something the conventional literacy perspective obscures. The APL study, for example, suggested that now, just as in Jefferson’s time, gender affects the chances of being literate: About 23 percent of women over age 18 were identified as functionally illiterate, compared with 17 percent of men. The more recent NALS data, however, did not confirm these gender differences, except in quantitative literacy activities.53 Perhaps more disturbing were the differences in literacy among different ethnic groups. The APL study indicated that 16 percent of White people, 44 percent of Black peopl e, and 56 percent of Latinos over age 18 were functionally illiterate at that time. Although the illiteracy rate among minority youth is lower than that among adults, it is still scandalous. Limitations of the Functional Literacy Perspective The value of the functional literacy perspective is that it shows how our society educates (in terms of literacy, at least) different social groups to different degrees. There are, however, limits to this approach. As we have seen earlier, despite his own use of the functional perspective to illustrate the severe problem of illiteracy in the United States, Jonathan Kozol argues against the term “functional.” He writes, “If there is a single word we would do well to wipe away from the vocabulary of a literate society, it is the invidious modifier ‘functional.’ It is a bad word, chosen by technicians but unfortunately accepted without protest by the humanistic scholar and the pedagogic world alike.”54 Kozol’s basic objection to the functional literacy perspective is that it denotes as a goal “the competence to function at the lowest levels of mechanical performance” instead of indicating a more ambitious conception of literacy. Certainly Jefferson did not have only minimum competence in mind when he described the connections between literacy and a free society. Educator Colin Lankshear and others have added to Kozol’s criticism of the functional literacy perspective. A second limitation on this perspective, according to Lankshear, is its tendency to blame the victims of social inequality for illiteracy. The emphasis tends to fall on the personal deficiency of the illiterate person. Consequently, the concept of functional illiteracy, in practice, tends to initiate... Read more at location 287

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the minimum work levels that industry needs. Who does this benefit most, the learner or industry? Lankshear asks. Under NCLB, educators have witnessed a renewal of curricular “Taylorization.” Mechanical, scripted reading programs such as Success For All (SFA) and Reading First (RF) have increasingly deskilled the teaching of reading. Like the methods of Frederick Taylor, as we have seen, these programs disproportionately affect students and teachers in low-SES and minority schools.56 With Reading First we see an intriguing intersection between literacy, corporate influence peddling, and consolidation. In a recent case, these two giants of the reading industry, RF and SFA, battled over the curricular moral high ground. In 2007 a federal inspection of RF found evidence that program directors steered the grant-application process for the $1 billion annual initiative to ensure that particular reading programs and instructional approaches were widely used and that others were essentially left out.57 Indeed, recent studies have shown that while RF increased some functional/ basic reading skills, comprehension, the building block of advanced literacy, in fact declined. This limitation of the functional perspective becomes apparent in popular news articles on illiteracy as a threat to institutions—“The Scourge of Adult Illiteracy,” as the New York Times put it.58 Popular news stories warn that illiteracy is so high that soon “there won’t be enough people equipped to handle complex new technology” and that “these functional illiterates exact a high national price” in terms of the costs of welfare and unemployment compensation. Or, as literacy advocate Barbara Bush, mother of President George W. Bush, argued, “Most people don’t know we spend 6.6 billion dollars a year to keep 750,000 illiterates in jail. I’m trying to remind people that there’s a direct correlation between crime and illiteracy, between illiteracy and unemployment.”59 These comments emphasize that functional illiteracy is dysfunctional for society. It is a “social disease that affects us all,” proclaims an advertisement by Gulf & Western Corporation. To help people become functionally literate, from this perspective, is to indicate how they can help institutions function better. Educator Neil Postman notes in this connection that “some minimal reading skill is necessary if you are to be a ‘good citizen,’ but ‘good citizen’ here means one who can follow the instruction of those who govern him.”60 Two other perspectives on literacy have been developed in an effort to overcome the limitations of the functional perspective. The more conservative of the two has become known as cultural literacy, while the more radical may be regarded as critical or emancipatory literacy. What, in your view, does the functional literacy perspective contribute to our understanding of the political economy of literacy in the United States? If these are valuable contributions, is the functional approach an adequate view of literacy on which to base educational policy? Explain. Thinking Critically about the Issues #3 Critical Literacy Critical literacy is a multidisciplinary perspective that refocuses us on the issue of knowledge and the distribution of power in educational communities working to maintain and improve their democratic institutions and hopes. This is a refocusing on education as nurturing the ability to see what will “secure or endanger” freedom. Those who embrace the critical literacy perspective most frequently pay respect to the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose 1973 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains the most creative and influential work in critical literacy. Freire explicitly avoids making recommendations for literacy education in the United States but approves of the efforts of U.S. educators to do so. In particular, Freire cites the work of Henry Giroux, a professor of curriculum theory who has done a great deal to define the significance of Freire’s work for schooling in the United States. Giroux... Read more at location 288

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literacy, and cultural literacy—miss the essential value of literacy, which is its potential for human liberation. This is why critical literacy is sometimes referred to as emancipatory literacy. Freire and Macedo write: In our analysis, literacy becomes a meaningful construct to the degree that it is viewed as a set of practices that functions to either empower or disempower people. In the larger sense, literacy is analyzed according to whether it serves as a set of cultural practices that promotes democratic and emancipatory change.64 For critical theorists, the other three forms of literacy examined in this chapter serve primarily to support established relations of oppression and thus disempower people rather than empower them. Critical Literacy Method The first three literacy perspectives are all compatible with the teaching methods most commonly used in U.S. schools—methods that emphasize learning the skills of reading and writing and learning information about U.S. and world culture. The methods for teaching from a critical literacy perspective, however, are not so familiar. In Education under Siege, Aronowitz and Giroux provide some beginning principles on which a critical literacy pedagogy could be based: In the first instance, critical literacy would make clear the connection between knowledge and power. It would present knowledge as a social construction linked to norms and values, and it would demonstrate modes of critique that illuminate how, in some cases, knowledge serves very specific economic, political, and social interests. . . . Thus, critical literacy is linked to notions of self- and social empowerment as well as to the process of democratization. In the most general sense, critical literacy means helping students, teachers, and others learn how to read the world and their lives critically and relatedly; it means developing a deeper understanding of how knowledge gets produced, sustained, and legitimated; and most importantly, it points to forms of social action and collective struggle.65 Exactly what this might mean in terms of specific classroom practice is a matter that remains to be worked out by both theorists and teachers. Helping “students, teachers, and others learn how to read the world critically” is not something that theorists claim to know exactly how to do in the context of the United States, so they look to the achievements of Paulo Freire in Brazil and elsewhere. Instead of teaching Brazilian peasants the language and cultural information of the educated Read more at location 289

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In Theory and Resistance in Education, Henry Giroux points out that Freire’s work long ago showed how literacy has the potential not only to liberate people but to make oppressed people believe that the dominant culture is correct in portraying them as “inferior and responsible for their location in the class structure.” Giroux continues: “In this case—largely as a result of what it does not say—literacy produces powerlessness, making people voiceless and denying them the tools they need to think and act reflectively.”62 These comments illustrate several important features of the critical literacy perspective. First, critical literacy draws attention to power relations in society by focusing on oppression. Usually this oppression is defined in terms of economic and political discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or (perhaps most pervasively) social class. Second, the critical literacy perspective, unlike the other literacy perspectives examined in this chapter, particularly attends to how knowledge and power are interrelated. In modern capitalist society, as in other societies, what knowledge is of most worth is determined by those who dominate the culture’s institutions. The dominant ideology is dominant because its proponents are those people who control the social institutions. People without such class-defined knowledge, usually the poor and otherwise oppressed, are considered inferior to those in the dominant educated class. Third, for critical literacy theorists, the basis of literacy is the capacity to think and act reflectively, not the ability to read lines on a page. That is, the connection between literacy and liberty is taken so seriously in this perspective that the skill of reading words is considered less significant than the skill of “reading the world,” as Freire says. The point of critical literacy is not reading words but understanding the world—and acting to change the social relations of oppression to relations of liberation. Giroux writes: Literacy, for Freire, is a quality of human consciousness as well as the mastery of certain skills. The uniqueness of this approach is that it is situated in a critical perspective that stresses the transformation of relations between the dominated and the dominant within the boundaries of specific historical contexts and concrete cultural settings.63 Simply put, the critical literacy perspective redefines literacy as the ability to understand and act against the social relations of oppression. Because they lack an account of this combined ability to understand and to act, argue critical literacy theorists, the other forms of literacy—conventional literacy, functional Read more at location 289

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classes, Freire took as his starting point the experiences, understandings, and language of the peasants themselves. He based his pedagogy on the importance of “dialogue,” in which teacher and students educated one another with respect to their understandings of the world. The knowledge of the peasants was not regarded as inferior or inadequate but as legitimate learning that could be critically examined for its strengths and weaknesses. In particular, the dialogue took seriously the peasants’ discontent with their conditions at the bottom of the socioeconomic order and sought to develop an understanding of why those conditions prevailed. In constructing such an understanding, both teacher and students developed a greater awareness of the ways in which inequality and oppression were built into the social and economic order of Brazilian society—and they began to develop ways to change that order. In relying on Freire’s theories and practices in Brazil, Henry Giroux offers the following as an initial step toward a corresponding pedagogy in U.S. schools: The type of critical pedagogy being proposed here is fundamentally concerned with student experience; it takes the problems and needs of the students themselves as its starting point. This suggests both confirming and legitmating the knowledge and experience through which students give meaning to their lives. Most obviously, this means replacing the authoritative discourse of imposition and recitation with a voice capable of listening, retelling, and challenging the very grounds of knowledge and power. . . . It is important to stress that a critical pedagogy of literacy and voice must be attentive to the contradictory nature of student experience and voice and therefore establish the grounds whereby such experience can be interrogated and analyzed with respect to both strengths and weaknesses.66 One might legitimately ask of such an approach, “But what about reading and writing? Doesn’t critical literacy include reading and writing?” E. D. Hirsch wrote an article citing the high written and “cultural” literacy requirements in the pedagogy of hegemony theorist and critical theory avatar Antonio Gramsci.67 Indeed, Gramsci argued for a traditional curriculum and against what might have been termed a “life adjustment” curriculum, as a guard against an intellectually and politically crippled society. The most direct answer to this question is yes. The critical literacy perspective does include reading and writing, but it defines them in important new ways. Reading and writing are not perceived as a set of skills for merely functioning in existing society or as a way to become “culturally literate” but rather as a means to understand, express, and change the social relations that favor some people at the expense of others. Giroux, Kozol, Shor, and others recognize that those who are unable to read and write are easily victimized by a society that values reading and writing so highly. But mere functional literacy drill endangers the stimulation of interest and meaning, which may make schooling for marginalized children more meaningfully a promise for fair chances to advance their education, and will not in itself Read more at location 290

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prevent such victimization. For critical literacy to exist, there must be a combination of critical understandings and actions together with the ability to use the language tools of the dominant culture. Cultural Literacy: Arguments for High-Status Curriculum Recognizing the limitations of the functional literacy perspective, scholars such as de Castell, Luke, and MacLennan have called for a conception of literacy that takes into account particular cultural contexts and “the broader literacy needs for social and political practice, as determined by the needs of any truly participatory democracy.”68 This is an expansion of the meaning of literacy cited in national reports, and includes the importance of knowledge underlying the decoding process used in message decoding and interpretation. Perhaps the most prominent and influential effort to describe a conception of literacy consistent with the cultural context and democratic ideals of U.S. schools is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s, best-selling 1987 book Cultural Literacy. Hirsch deplores any conception of literacy that reflects only a technical “skills orientation” to reading. In a related article written for educators, Hirsch argues that language cannot be disentangled from the cultural knowledge and understandings that give language meaning. Thus, “if one believes in literacy, one must also believe in cultural literacy.”69 Hirsch claims that his conception of cultural literacy goes beyond the technical reading of functional literacy to embrace the democratic ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr. His critics, of course, disagree.70 Hirsch’s approach could also be described as cultural “fluency” with a focus on “acquaintanceship” with a multiplicity of persons, terms, and concepts, which Hirsch argues are indispensable to the furnishing of a cultivated or cultured mind. Critics would argue that disembodied term collections lead away from the stimulation of interest and meaning-making that is essential to the development of critical literacy. Hirsch and two colleagues—a historian and a natural scientist—compiled a 63-page categorized list of names, places, events, titles, and other items to illustrate the kinds of things with which culturally literate people should be familiar (see Exhibit 9.1). The list is an effort to reflect unexplained information that writers typically mention in everyday publications, information that “truly literate” people must bring to the act of reading. In part, this list is intended to serve as an educational checklist: Are we teaching these items in school? If not, says Hirsch, we are teaching only the mechanics of reading and writing, something far short of true literacy in his view. Cultural Literacy: Whose Interests Are Served? The cultural literacy perspective seems well suited to the educational aims of those who would return to a “knowledge-based” curriculum that emphasizes familiarity with the traditional elements of the nation’s dominant cultural perspectives. These perspectives are largely grounded in the achievements of White, male, middle-class culture, as a look at Hirsch’s list in Exhibit 9.1 reveals —and as he himself readily admits. Hirsch’s argument for the need to employ language and cultural knowledge and understandings in reading and writing suggests that there is one culture, one language, and one set of knowledge and understanding needed for a person to become culturally literate. Hirsch is by now familiar with the concern of his critics: that his list is culturally exclusive and privileges Euro-American language and perspective. His book with Joseph F. Kett and James Trefil has a response curriculum for nationalism: We know from the history of Europe that national schools can achieve high literacy “. . . for everyone in a multicultural population. France did so with a population that, up to the eighteenth century, spoke at least four different languages. . . . Viewed in a long historical perspective, it has been the school, not the home, that has been the decisive... Read more at location 291

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multicultural roots and that to know our culture deeply, we should know those diverse origins: [L]argely because of Europe’s involvement in half a millennium of trade and of empire, her economy, technology, religion, and culture are not the products only of “white” people, of Europeans and their descendants outside Europe. Take two entirely different, but representative examples: that the rebirth of European philosophy in the European Renaissance owed a great deal to the Arab scholars who had kept alive Greek classical learning during the European Dark Ages; and the idea of democracy in the United States was refashioned in part out of the contributions of African-Americans whose understanding of freedom was deepened by their understanding of the Old Testament and by their experience of racial slavery. What we are suggesting, in effect, is that we all participate, albeit from different cultural positions, in a global system of culture. That culture is increasingly less dominated by the West, less Eurocentric, if you like. And so there must be more and more people in the West, like ourselves, who are both aware of their ignorance of many of the “other” traditions and want to know more. . . . [W]e have placed some of the achievements of Western culture alongside those of many other cultures and traditions. We have done this in part because those juxtapositions enrich our understanding and appreciation of the achievements of “our” culture; Read more at location 292

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part because we think that in preparing the new generations for culture that is more global, it is essential for them to learn about William Shakespeare as they learn about Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, Murasaki Shikibu from Japan, Rabin dranath Tagore from India.72 Appiah and Gates chose an interesting method. They contacted scholars from cultures around the world, asking them for their views of the most important components of their respective cultures—components so significant that all well-educated people in a global society should know something about them. The first 10 entries reveal something about what this method yielded. The definitions of these terms range from half a column to two columns in length, but the abbreviated phrases below will give you some idea of the breadth of the entries. Abakwa, Sociedad—a secret society of African extraction based in Cuba. abangan—an Indonesian term referring to a large Javanese peasant community there. ‘Abbasid—the second major dynasty of Islamic rulers, or caliphs. ‘Abd al-Nasir, Gamal (Nasser, 1918–1970)—Egyptian political leader, one of the Arab world’s greatest 20thcentury leaders. Achebe, Chinua (1930– )—Nigerian essayist and novelist, author of Things Fall Apart. adab—Arabic term meaning “manners” and “literatur e.” adat—Arabic term for a particular system of customs and legal arrangements. Ade, King Sunny (1946– )—Nigerian musician internationally known for his dance-pop Yoruba juju music. adobe—building material made of heavy clay soil, sun-dried into bricks. Aeschylus (525–456 b.c.e.)—Greek playwright, author of oldest extant body of Greek drama, including Seven Against Thebes and Agamemnon.73 In one sense, both dictionaries of cultural literacy share in common the commitment to a notion of literacy that goes beyond the technical skill of decoding symbols into words. Each seeks a deeper understanding of ourselves and our culture’s ideals and processes. And each approach reflects an understanding that cultural literacy —in the sense of knowing a little bit about a lot of cultural concepts—is not the same as an ideal of a well-educated person. As Hirsch et al. say: We also hope and expect that no one will be willing to stop with cultural literacy as a final educational aim. Cultural literacy is a necessary but not sufficient attainment of an educated person. Cultural literacy is shallow; true education is deep. But our analysis of reading and learning suggests the paradox that broad shallow knowledge is the best route to deep knowledge.74 Some educators believe that one route to deeper knowledge is implied in the concept of critical literacy, to which we now turn. Surely the cultural literacy perspective is correct in seeking to go beyond the mechanics of reading and writing to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our society’s ideals and processes. However, the question remains: Does cultural literacy, as Hirsch advocates it, really embody the best aims of literacy? Advocates of critical literacy answer with an emphatic no. Schooling and Ideological Hegemony A number of researchers have investigated ways in which schooling socializes students into an authoritarian and unequal social order that claims allegiance to freedom and equality. So examined, the school can be seen as a status quo institution that reinforces dominant values and ideologies and teaches uncritical acceptance of the existing social order. Ideological hegemony theory suggests that it is not consent but compliance that is fostered in the schools and that both the organization and the curriculum of schools are responsible for this compliance. Hegemony theory focuses importantly on the content of school curriculum material. Students are socialized into the existing political–economic system not just by practicing it in schools but by having it portrayed in their texts as desirable and legitimate. Texts routinely praise our economic and political system and routinely criticize other systems. Likewise, texts rarely criticize our system. The first... Read more at location 293

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free market system that routinely appears in social studies textbooks, the corresponding claim that the U.S. free market economy is democratic, and the delegitimation of alternative political–economic systems. Such claims are in some measure misleading: There is no completely free market economy in the United States, and if there were, it would not necessarily be democratic. Slavery and some of the most antidemocratic abuses of immigrants, women, and children occurred in a historical period when our economy was much less regulated by government than it now is. Similarly, trumpeting the U.S. political –economic system over the systems of other nations obscures important truths. As Derek Bok has shown, citizens of the United States lag behind the citizens of most other industrialized nations in the majority of measures of quality of life.75 A critical consciousness, while of primary importance, is not enough; it must be accompanied by reading and writing skills, which have the potential to enhance personal and social liberation. Donaldo Macedo writes that the radical educator “will enable students to become literate in their culture as well as in the codes of the dominant classes.” Freire elaborates on this point by using the illustration of Black students in U.S. schools: The successful usage of the students’ cultural universe requires respect and legitimation of students’ discourse, that is, their own linguistic codes, which are different but never inferior. . . . In the case of black Americans, for example, educators must respect black English. . . . The legitimation of black English as an educational tool does not, however, preclude the need to acquire proficiency in the linguistic code of the dominant group.76 A tension clearly exists here. What balance should the critical perspective seek between criticism of the dominant culture on the one hand and learning its “linguistic code” on the other? Such tension is inherent, from the critical literacy perspective, in learning both to “read the world” critically and to “read the word,” which may be uncritical and biased. Without the critical reading of the unequal power relations that structure society, however, literacy does not realize its essential value of liberating the literate—at least in the critical literacy perspective. Contemporary curriculum theorist Cameron McCarthy is among those who argue that teachers can effectively engage students in examining how knowledge is produced and sustained in U.S. schools and the wider cultures and that such an investigation will necessarily have to consider relations of power in the wider culture.77 Teachers can think critically about curriculum and textbook use and seek participation in the widening of source material selection. They can also intervene prudently yet effectively by encouraging democratic processes in school space use and in student learning activities. In the educational reform movement of the 1980s a great many different “literacies” were advocated: functional literacy, computer literacy, civic literacy, aesthetic literacy, and so on. Each use of the term literacy focuses on a different realm of learning that its advocates wish to designate as fundamental to education as the three Rs. Using the word literacy seems to accomplish this. As a result, the term is often used to mean that which the one using it believes should be learned. Thus, the meaning of the term becomes altered in ways that serve different social and educational aims. From this perspective, one can see what kind of education is being promoted by the advocates of each kind of literacy treated in this chapter. Those who advocate functional literacy want people to function in society’s existing social and economic roles; those who promote cultural literacy want a greater understanding of the established culture; those who advocate critical literacy focus on empowering people to criticize and change political and economic oppression. There are no advocates of conventional literacy as an educational goal because it... Read more at location 294

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individuals themselves rather than in the larger social order—a social order that seems systematically to allocate illiteracy to some socioeconomic groups but not to others. Finally, if the goal is to emphasize the relationship between literacy and empowerment, the critical literacy perspective seems most valuable. It begins with the notion that power is unequally and undemocratically distributed in contemporary society; it emphasizes that those in power define their knowledge as the most worthwhile; it recognizes that traditional definitions of literacy serve the interests of those who have the greatest wealth and power, not those who have the least; and it asserts that literacy should help those with the least power understand these relationships and act to change them. Paulo Freire has long practiced such an approach to literacy in Brazil and elsewhere, but the practice of critical literacy in the United States lags behind the theory. We can evaluate the different literacy perspectives, then, by reference to various goals. It is therefore important to choose perspectives carefully. Which one, for example, is best suited to the interests of inner-city schoolchildren? An inner-city teacher or school that embraces a functional literacy perspective may be largely satisfied if all students can read at the sixth-grade level when they graduate from high school, because such students will be able to function in society. But a teacher who embraces cultural literacy might ask, “What understandings do such students have of Western civilization, of U.S. economic, social, and political institutions? Enough to participate as citizens and voters or only enough to choose the best buy at the supermarket?” And a teacher of critical literacy could ask, “And what if students did have such knowledge of historical and contemporary institutions? Whose interests would such knowledge serve: their own interests in becoming equal participants in political life or the interest of those who benefit from leaving political power and participation unequal?” Different perspectives on literacy reflect different educational aims. Teachers seeking to engage their students in a curriculum that empowers students in democracy and a pedagogy of human rights are frustrated by the recent growth of deskilling and what theorist Michael Apple has termed the conservative “restoration” of property privileges in education.78 Freire wrote an elegant book that is a signpost toward inclusive democratic literacy. Titled Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, Freire urges students to identify with their students’ struggles and nurture their voices and writing toward developing a critical literacy. The journal Rethinking Schools is an invaluable source for teachers looking for models of critical pedagogy. In just one issue Hawaiian educator Wayne Au emphasizes how critical teacher practice is possible and desirable. There the curriculum emphasizes student voices blending with the stories in curriculum. There the diversity of functional and cultural literacy are incomplete without this blend of democratic practice. He also emphasizes that critical literacy practice is a team sport. Nurturing local regional and national networks is a key element in teacher professional life.79 It is instructive at this point to reflect upon Thomas Jefferson’s view of the importance of literacy in the United States (see Chapter 2). Clearly Jefferson thought literacy was important for the everyday reading and writing, buying and selling functions that people had to do at that time. He also valued literacy for the cultural understanding it made possible; he advocated the teaching of history, for example, in the elementary grades. And Jefferson was clearly fond of the cultural achievements of civilized humanity; he valued reading the works considered classics for the pleasure of learning and enjoyment of literature. But Jefferson was not satisfied with a literacy that was restricted to everyday functioning and cultural appreciation, though he valued... Read more at location 295

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liberty. Similarly, both the cultural literacy perspective and the critical literacy perspective claim to preserve an indispensable relationship between liberty and literacy, yet they do so in different ways. The cultural literacy perspective emphasizes traditions of representative government and participation in established institutions. The critical literacy perspective asserts that when these institutions are themselves constituted undemocratically, only by developing a critical perspective on power and knowledge can literacy serve the goal of rejuvenating political and economic liberty for all citizens, not just the privileged classes. Jefferson believed he had articulated a conception of literacy that, for his own time, was consistent with democratic ideals. There is one question we may ask of each perspective on literacy examined in this chapter. To what degree is it consistent with democratic ideals in our own time and place? It is a question we may rightfully ask of any educational approach in our society and one that recurs in various forms throughout the remainder of this text. to recognize that their teaching is not just about reading, writing, ‘rithmetic, or calculus, or foreign language. It is also about imparting social and political values, whether teachers mean to do this or not. Schools don’t just teach lessons about literacy; they teach lessons about how society works, who succeeds and who does not, and why. And to an important degree, teachers can influence what kinds of social and political messages get delivered in their classrooms. As this chapter illustrates, the literal and political significance of “literacy” has changed as society has changed. Although one who could read and write a bit was considered literate in Jefferson’s era, such rudimentary literacy skills do not necessarily qualify one as literate in our time. To some extent, the definition of literacy has changed with society. The various dimensions of literacy in contemporary life are coined in such terms as functional literacy, cultural literacy, and critical literacy, all of which differ from the conventional notion of literacy as the simple ability to read and write. While there is no universal agreement on the meanings of those coined terms, each points to a different way in which literacy is embedded in social contexts. Each reminds us that different teachers can settle for, or aspire to, different levels of literacy for their students—and that teachers can communicate different expectations of literacy to different students, whether they intend to or not. The concept of functional literacy, for example, is grounded in a view of the degree of literacy that people need to function well or independently in a world pervaded by the written word. In this respect, functional literacy in one time and place may differ from functional literacy in another. A question arises regarding what it is to function well or independently. Are the skills of reading and writing, however fluently, enough to interpret written text well? Or are some kinds of background knowledge also important in the uses of functional literacy? Such a question lies at the foundation of the notion of cultural literacy, which proposes that fluent reading and writing skills alone are not adequate for interpreting written text. Embedded in all such text are cultural meanings, and the reader’s understanding Read more at location 296

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of those meanings will influence the interpretation of the text. One task of educators, in this view, is not just to teach functional literacy skills but to teach the background knowledge necessary to interpret written text in its cultural context. Thus, knowledge of history, literature, politics, science, and other dimensions of human experience is necessary to make sense of written text. As the background knowledge differs so will the reader’s interpretation of the text differ. As a teacher in any subject, knowing that students bring different backgrounds to class, should you help the students connect new learning with the necessary background knowledge? Do some students need more help with this than others? Does your philosophy guide you to give different kinds of help to different students? Advocates of critical literacy argue that any adequate conception of literacy should include a conceptual connection to human liberty. They assert that it is important for citizens to develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to reflect critically on their experiences and the power relations within their daily lives. They further argue that functional or even cultural literacy is a tool that can be used to liberate or to dominate; if literacy is to be liberating, people need to be educated to think carefully about power. The power of functional and cultural literacy to assist in dominating a population’s ways of understanding the world is illustrated by the concept of ideological hegemony, sometimes referred to as cultural hegemony. Consideration of the decisionmaking processes of modern capitalist culture suggests that while Jefferson may have been correct that a society cannot be ignorant and free, neither is education a guarantee of freedom. The popular press and other news and entertainment media, together with the schools, can inculcate ways of thinking and valuing in a population that leave gross concentrations of economic and political power in the hands of a very small minority while a society proudly proclaims itself as democratic. Nor is there strong reason to believe at this time that new communications technologies will seriously challenge the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Read more at location 297

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could be sexism, consumerism, glorification of violence, desire to win or succeed even if cheating is necessary, and so on. Good teachers know what social values they stand for, and which they stand against. How can you justify to others the fostering of values that may seek to resist certain social norms? In the public schools, a religious position is not an appropriate justification for a teacher’s choice of values. How might democratic values constitute a basis for your choices of what values to embrace, and which to reject, in your classroom? Your philosophy of education should be able to make that clear. Read more at location 298

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We are left to wonder what Jefferson would think of the role today’s schools play in the process of developing self-governing citizens. It would appear that our schools—and the kind of literacy they develop —play at least some role in helping students accept that participatory selfgovernment is no longer a realistic goal in modern society. Moreover, as Dewey pointed out, schools are only one agency of socialization, and there are many others in society. Some, like family, peer groups, and the media, may be more powerful than schools at instilling values that you as a teacher might find objectionable: among these Read more at location 298

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