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Content LITERACY AND CLASS STRUCTURE IN AMERICA
by
J. Elspeth Stuckey
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1986
UMI Num ber: D P23116
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CAUFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
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Ph.D.
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This dissertation, w ritten by
J. Elspeth Stuckey
under the direction of .. D issertation
Committee, and approved b y all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
D O C TO R OF PH ILO SOPH Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
D a te.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
CONTENTS
Chapter I: A Theory of Class Structure 3
Chapter II: The Ideology of Literacy 35
Chapter III: A Theory of Literacy 103
Chapter IV: Programs of Literacy 182
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Peter Manning and Steve Krashen for
reading this dissertation.
I am grateful to the members of my original qualifying
committee Marilyn Cooper, Louise Phelps and W. Ross
Winterowd.
I would like to express appreciation to Leo Braudy, Denton
Holland, Luther Luedtke, Clancy Sigal, and Jay Vanatta for
their invaluable support.
I am the beneficiary of the ideas and the time of Myra
Barres, James Britton, Peter Busby, Catherine Dean, Keith
Hoskin, Jane MacKillop, Alex McLeod, Nancy Martin, Margaret
Meek, Peter Medway, James Raymond, Harold Rosen, James
Sledd, Michael Smith, Richard Sterling and Leslie Stratta.
I could not have completed this dissertation without Chris
Hodgdon and Vivian Sprouse.
I would like to thank Michael Holzman.
Introduction
In the United States we live the mythology of a
classless society. We believe our society provides equal
opportunities for all and promises success to those who
work hard to achieve it. We believe the key to achievement
is education, and at the heart of the educational endeavor
is literacy. In a society bound by such a mythology, our
views about literacy are our views about political economy
and social opportunity.
This study surveys the literature, theory, and
practice of literacy in an attempt to explode the mythology
and question its foundations. It argues that usual1
speculations about the nature and need for literacy are
misguided. It argues that these speculations are wrong
because the assumptions about economic and social forces on
which they are based are faulty. It argues that literacy
itself can only be understood in its social and political
context and that that context, once the mythology has been
stripped away, can be seen as one of entrenched class
structure in which those who have power have a vested
interest in maintaining it.
Current practices in research, theory-making, and
teaching are not just misguided but also destructive. Far
from engineering freedom, our current approach to literacy
entrenches the factors which prevent freedom and limit
1
opportunity. In a self-serving society such as ours, our
efforts in education too often only reinforce the
strategies of self-service.
The current high profile of literacy is symptomatic of
our speedy transition from an industrial to an information
based economy. This economic shift accentuates literacy's
role in economic growth, class structure, and social
estrangement. Literacy, to be sure, is a powerful, unique
technology. Yet it remains a human invention contained by
social contract. How we in education use literacy will as
surely tell our ideas of humanity as it will enforce them.
Are we helping those in need of economic and social
opportunity, or those who wish to maintain their own
economic and social advantage?
These are the issues and questions which inform the
analysis that follows. These are the questions that
enlarge the topic of literacy beyond the narrow scope of
teaching techniques and national cries of alarm over the
high rates of illiteracy in the United States. The issues
surrounding literacy are thus complex, but they are not
mysterious. This study attempts to demystify them.
I: A Theory of Class Structure
The idea of a class structure is uncomfortable for
many Americans. It is anathema to American educators.
Mortimer Adler, author of The Paideia Proposal; An
Educational Manifesto, demonstrates this discomfort when he
says of the United States, "We are politically a classless
society. Our citizenry as a whole is our ruling class. We
should, therefore, be an educationally classless society"
(5). Adler is classically American in his optimism.
In some of the first sociological research conducted
in the United States, Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd found
it unnecessary to classify more than two groups in the
population of Middletown, USA, in 1924 (Middletown 22-23).
These were the Business class and the Working class. By
1935, however, a follow-up study produced six classes (six
becomes the number of classes subject to wide
standardization in subsequent sociological, federal, and
educational research). Yet the Lynds reported that class
structure was an unpopular idea. They said of Middletown,
It is more congenial to the mood of the city,
proud of its traditions of democratic equality to
think of the lines of cleavage within its social
systems as based not upon class differences but
rather upon the entirely spontaneous and
completely individual and personal predilections
of the 12,500 families who compose its
population. (Middletown in Transition 60)
The Lynds had sought out and identified a "Middletown"
to discover the peculiarities of American class; certainly
3
they experienced partial success by locating it in this
denial of class distinctions.
The American propensity to deny class is recognized by
non-Americans, too. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal described the
prototypical American as one who "investigates his own
faults, puts them on record, and shouts them from the
housetops, adding the most severe recriminations against
himself, including the accusation of hypocrisy" (21).
Myrdal was specifically concerned with how Americans deal
with the problems of racism, problems which others subsume
under the construct of class (Lewontin et al. 26, 119-129;
Wilkins 437). Smiling optimism, which Myrdal calls "bright
fatalism . . . unmatched in the rest of the Western World"
somehow both captivates and confuses the American soul
(xix). Even staunch empirical sociologists are forced to
admit that "although systematic evidence is lacking,"
Americans "are less class-conscious than Europeans" (Kahl
174).
There is another side to this peculiar notion,
however, and that is how such optimism persists in the face
of contradiction. Some emergent groups, for example, do
seem to constitute a "ragged bottom margin" in which poor
whites and Negroes fit most frequently (Kahl 60). W. Lloyd
Warner, in an early forties study of a town he named
Yankeeville identified a lowest of the low classes which he
called "the 'lulus' or disrepectable and often slovenly
4
people . . . who waited for public relief" (qtd. in Kahl
26). These groups were composed of the unskilled and
uneducated. How did they come to fail to benefit from an
optimistic system, one which denied the possibility of
"class" failure?
The answer sociologists often give belies the
difficulty of the situation and capitalizes on it. The
answer is rooted in the dominant attitude of well-being and
usually rests on the American faith in individual strength
and will power; citizens get what they achieve. There is,
for example, the myth of the loner, the American
individualist who stakes out his territory and defines his
own worth. Richard Sennett in The Hidden Injuries of Class
backhands the notion this way: "If you don't belong to the
society, society can't hurt you" (55). Sennett's
knowledge, of course, is to the contrary. Nevertheless,
confidence in the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness"
mentality is pervasive. It explains what is perhaps most
insidious and distressing about the American system of
class— the willingness, if not the felt need, of
disfranchised citizens to rationalize their inequality.
Michael Harrington in The New American Poverty writes:
If you ask the unemployed steelworkers in the Mon
[Monongahela] Valley about their social class,
they do not have a moment's hesitation. 'We pay
the taxes and take care of the kids and go out
for beer and pizza,' a steelworker's wife— an
activist in her own right— insisted. 'We're
middle class.' Or, as Douglas Fraser, the former
5
president of the auto worker's union put it,
these are ’working people of the middle class'.
. . . (40)
Harrington calls this description "a sociological
contradiction and a psychological fact in a country where
the working class exists but cannot say its own name" (40).
In fact, a number of the disfranchised are immigrants.
However, as Harrington points out, the greatest number of
welfare users and unemployed are white, native-born
Americans (29). The nationality or the race of the
unemployed is not the point, however. The point is the
unemployed and the impoverished matrix in which growing
numbers of Americans find themselves trapped. The issue is
not distaste for class but how distaste obscures class.
The most salient aspect of the argument is occupation.
In American sociology, occupation has been virtually
explained away. Although historical class definitions have
placed occupation at the center of class lives, American,
empirical sociologists have treated occupation as only one
variable of class. Occupation is a sort of leading
indicator. Kahl calls occupation a "convenient" variable
because it predicts
a man's education; it suggests the type of
associates he comes in contact with; it tells
something of the contribution he makes to the
community welfare; it hints at the degree of his
authority over other people. (53)
These other variables are understood to occupy positions of
equal worth, of parity. Six of them emerge to pattern the
6
fabric of daily life; from them can be taken summary
descriptions of class and human hierarchy.
These six standardized indicators or variables of
class are personal prestige, occupation, possessions,
interaction, class consciousness, and value orientation.
The most "conspicuous" manifestation of class behavior,
however, is difficult to pin to any one variable. That
behavior is "consumption"— how people spend their money.
Gerard Lenski asserts that the most important question in
class research is "who gets what and why" (3); the "what,"
of course, is the consumed— possessions, values,
educational rites, etc.
These variables are only baselines, however. Their
utility lies in an extra-empirical framework so devised to
make possible the quantification of qualities (such as
prestige) and to assimilate newer quantifications into
longstanding measures such as census categories. Once the
frameworks have been validated, as they are on the basis of
sheer repetition, the limits of supposition are few. Thus,
Warner in the Yankeeville study, grew to distrust his
original benchmark of economic status as the determinant of
class position and expanded the study to include "a vast
collection of data"; Warner concluded that the classes of
Yankeeville were rarely confused given information about
"education, occupation, wealth, income, family, intimate
friends, clubs and fraternities, as well as . . . manners,
7
speech, and general outward behavior.” In a crunch, he
decided, "repeated home invitation[s] to dinner" identified
class equality between persons (qtd. in Kahl 23-27).
The value to sociologists of these procedures (whose
questionableness is long overdue) is summary. On the basis
of numerous studies such as the Lynd and Warner projects,
Kahl presumes to draw a six-tiered strata of American
society, the "ideal" rather than actual types which result
from meticulous addition, averaging, and, obviously, bias.
Thus, Kahl identifies summary top halves and bottom halves
of society. In the top half are the "graceful livers" and
the "career inspired"; in the bottom are the "apathetic."
The "graceful livers" exhibit more than anything else an
"attitude" toward life that places them above the rest.
They are capable of companionship, versatile in hobbies,
can "talk of music or politics or business." The next
notch down, the "career inspired" citizens expend a good
bit of their time at work, albeit successfully: "Their
whole way of life— their consumption behavior, their sense
of accomplishment and respectability, the source of much of
their prestige with others— depends upon success in a
career. The husband's career becomes the central social
fact for the family." This class is also convinced that
its success has grown out of "greater talent and greater
devotion to jobs" than class members of other ilk. The
"apathetic," on the other hand, unlike the "respectable"
8
middle classes, suffer from fatalism. Entire families live
in one room. The "apathetic" drift from job to job and
have few skills. Unfortunately for them, they also suffer
from "inferior biological stock . . . an inescapable
handicap." Kahl concludes this taxonomy by admitting that
there is variation from state to state in the union and "a
great deal of controversy over detail," yet he believes
that class in America can be pretty well dilineated and
understood within these terms (184-217).
One obvious problem, grievous in its clarity, is that
class descriptions like these overstate their warrants.
Lenski calls resulting inconsistencies within the hierarchy
"status inconsistency" (87). A Negro doctor, for example,
is not highly esteemed by mill workers nor visited by upper
class whites. A pipefitter who lives next door to a school
teacher rates twice the pay and half the social esteem
(Sennett 35; Heath, Ways 34).
A sort of palliative to these lapses comes in the form
of social ethnography, an alternative research procedure
that has grown in esteem in the last decade. Ethnography
has always accompanied empirical research, but its nature,
until recently, was more openly ulterior and its use
sporadic. A researcher, for example, would identify a type
of class member then seek out representatives. This would
lead to a kind of evidence-by-witness class structure
within a population. In the late fifties and mid-sixties,
9
for example, several well known studies of southern social
classes employed those methods. The Millways of Kent
provides a typical example. In it, the ethnographer
requests from an informant a description of members of the
community. A town "informant" supplies a description of
the males who work in the mill, men who
do so many hours of work in the mill, walk down
to their favorite hangout spots to sit around and
talk, get 'high' on weekends, and then go home to
beat their wives or do whatever they are
accustomed to doing. (Morland 176)
A town doctor corroborates the idea that mill folks are the
"dirtiest, nastiest people in the world" (Morland 176).
Such testimony made credible, and often explained away,
statistical deviations within class hierarchies. Recent
ethnographic methods have improved little.
A contemporary linguistic ethnography by Shirley Brice
Heath simply leaves tacit class assumptions. Informant
testimony, as well as the ethnographer's own observations,
appear to be a-political, so wholly valid. Class is
located in descriptions of clothes, home decor, club
membership. Women from the mill village wear polyester
pants suits with unpressed seams; town women buy their
polyester garments with more finished detail. Within
homes, plastic flowers, linear furniture arrangements, and
"double portraits of Coretta and Martin Luther King often
with small school photos of the household's children stuck
in the bottom of the same frame," differentiate class from
10
class (Ways 30-39, 55). Interestingly, linguistic
differences, which mitigate for and against successful
schooling, correspond to these features.
The purpose of the present analysis is less to refute
the entire tradition of American sociology than to point
out other directions. In early sociological work, such as
that of the Lynds, the discovery that peculiar habits and
situations cleaved to the self-sufficient, the working, and
the entrepreneurial members of a small town had its value.
The machine, as the Lynds observed, made tremendous impact
in the years from 1890-1910, and it was that impact they
sought to understand (Middletown 5). Also, the Lynds and
others attempted to be objective; they were motivated by
sincere desires to find and tell the truth about American
lives.
But the methodology reproduced rather than revealed
the meaning of class in America and as a measure of
knowledge and direction for action and sociological
tradition will not do.
Frank Parkin, a sociologist at the University of Kent,
points this out. He calls such sociology "pseudo-
empirical," a "moral referendum" whose procedures work in
the "way the Top Ten musical chart is constructed from the
total selections of individual record buyers" (40).
Parkin elaborates:
To plot each person's position on a variety of
11
different dimensions tends to produce statistical
categories composed of those who have a similar
'status profile,' but it does not identify the
type of social collectivities or classes which
have traditionally been the subject matter of
stratification. Such an approach tends to
obscure the systematic nature of inequality and
the fact that it is grounded in the material
order in a fairly identifiable fashion. (17)
He concludes that testimonials often reveal the
legitimation of a set of criteria already "legitimized
through society" (42). The legitimation, of course, begins
at the top to bring into concert the beliefs and actions of
those whose conformity to the current order is imperative.
Thus, it is useful to reify a socially affirmed description
of the "career" class which valorizes what it already does.
One intellectual upshot of the American sociological
definition of class is trivialization. Class cannot really
be pinned down, except in the ideal case, so it is in the
end subjective. This is to return the sociological journey
to the original point of departure, the primacy and
priority of the individual, the unclassifiable human being.
The structure that appears to arrange individuals is
basically epiphenomenal, contingent. Mobility, or as
sociologists put it, permeability, enervates structures
such that it is odd to think of occupying or staying in a
class. Sennett speaks of the pain of leaving a class
behind (139, 153) brought on by the almost obligatory sense
of the need to move up. John Dewey suggested a compatible
if rosier response to the mobility phenomenon. In a
12
society of bounty, he writes
if the culture pattern works out so that society
is divided into two classes, the working group
and the business (including professional) group,
with two and a half times as many in the former
as in the latter and with the chief ambition of
the parents in the former class that their
children should climb into the latter, that is
doubtless because American life offers such
unparalleled opportunities for each individual to
prosper according to his virtues. . . . (10)
Class, in effect, is something like winning, and losers
just do not play well enough or have bad luck or, perhaps,
never learn the rules— out of stupidity, laziness or
because they come from "inferior biological stock."
Awarding badges of superiority or inferiority, of
course, is not something an empirical sociology can do.
"Superiority," for example, is a state defined prior to the
collection and bundling of human features. The features
may, in fact, distribute themselves, but hierarchies emerge
on the basis of judgments. Asking informants to evaluate
features may better reveal social indoctrination than
objective evaluation. It certainly does not describe
actual relations. Whence comes social agreement about
lower class features, say, in an equal society? Of what
use is the definition of lower class in a classless state?
Parkin, and others (Levitas 74-5), repudiate much
American sociology on these grounds. Paraphrasing Karl
Marx's assertion that the ruling ideas in a society are the
ideas of the ruling class. Parkin says
13
it is plausible to regard social honour as an
emergent property generated by the class system.
More concisely, we can consider it as a system of
social evaluation arising from the moral
judgments of those who occupy dominant positions
in the class structure. (41-42)
Thus, American empirical sociology evolved within a
definition of class, and its methodologies operate to keep
it there.
Because methodologies operate within social
institutions, moreover, these institutions may be
constrained to distort reality. Such is their social
mandate. How, then, we must ask, can distortion be
prevented or undone. The case of the Lynd research
provides a helpful clue, for the Lynds could have reached
very different conclusions based on the data they gathered.
Their early work at the turn of the century revealed
two distinct classes, and the distinctions were based on
the work that the people did and the relationships between
those types of work within the town. The Lynds were very
clear:
While an effort will be made to make clear at
certain points variant behavior within these two
groups, it is after all this division into
working class and business class that constitutes
the outstanding cleavage in Middletown.
(Middletown 23)
One of their most fundamentally important statements
was that "the mere fact of being born upon one or the other
side of the watershed" most significantly determined a
person's activity "all day long through one's life."
14
Working class people, the Lynds described, "get their
living primarily by addressing things." They work on or
beside machines. Members of the business class, on the
other hand, dwell with others of their kind, addressing
"their activities pre-dominantly to people in the selling
or promotion of things, services, or ideas." Too, the
members of this class are the owners or writers of
contracts, credit, education, 'non-material' things, and
they control the negotiations between all townspeople; they
control the institutions of negotiation (Middletown 31).
Yet despite this realization of the basis for class
differences, by 1935 the Lynds' identification of six
classes appears to rest on a mood of community good will
and speculation about population growth, new kinds of
business, receding fears of the Depression, the expedience
of mechanization, etc. As Robert Lynd put it, "The city's
prevailing mood of optimism makes it view prosperity as
%
normal while each recurrent setback tends to come as a
surprise which local sentiment views as 'merely temporary'"
(Middletown Transition 13).
Lynd acknowledged that the gap between manager and
worker was greater in 1935 than in 1924; yet rather than
interpret the gap as a deepening of a fundamental division
between two classes, he broadened the strata. He abandoned
the idea of a fundamental class structure in America at the
same time he recognized a growing disparity in lives. He
15
began to blur distinctions between the two classes with the
result that the individual, rather than the class, assumed
primacy.
Lynd's own descriptions of the new classes evidence
the disintegration. In the follow-up study, low class
people are no longer described in terms of their
livelihoods but in terms of "the ramshackle, unpainted
cottages in the outlying unpaved streets of town" in which
they lived. A third group, out of six, was described as
those who would "never quite manage to be social peers of
group two (Middletown Transition 458-60). These
descriptions bear little resemblance to the earlier
descriptions of townspeoples lives; they do possess a post-
Depression coloration that tinges class description forever
after. Lynd, in the face of Middletown's mythology and
American ideology, caved in. The American society became
one which, for all sociology could determine, possessed a
multiplicity that defied classification. Sociology thus
was spared the reality of a hardened stratification
concerning, say, job opportunities; instead, it could
concentrate on variety, unmotivated orders — Americana.
Other accounts could have been given, however. The
Lynds could have interpreted the splintering of Middletown
and the hardening of the myth of a classless society to be
a conscious response to severe, increasingly entrenched,
and verifiable divisions among lives of the Middletown
16
citizens. Rather than supporting the emergence of more
class lines, the Lynd data could very well have analyzed
the ways in which class-divided citizens adapt to their
society. For, in fact, the lines between adaptations were
still drawn along economic realities. People spend the
money they make within the economy they support. The
leisure they engage in, the fabric of clothes they
purchase, the security of their homes and conditions of
their streets provide descriptions, not prescriptions, of
how people function under domination. Seen thus, the data
provides a way to understand the internalisation of
domination under class society as well as the
institutionalization of the social layout. Personal
testimonials reveal structures rather than denigrate them.
The example of the Lynds is important because the
Lynds were seminal and wrong. They supplied a rationale
and a descriptive technique for the continuation of
exploitation rather than a rationale to examine and
eradicate it. Certainly, as the Lynds suggest, the
structures of America class possess peculiarly American
characteristics. But the structures of American society
are found inside daily life; they mediate the possibilities
of American equality. What we still need to know, to
reveal, is the nature of those structures. Revelation, one
hopes, carries with it resolution; at the least, it
provides ways to unmask brutality and injustice. To those
17
ends, a useful sociology of class structure must turn.
The first basis, as Parkin pointed out, of such a
sociology should be the recognition of inequality that
results from social and economic conditions. Within any
society, citizens make their lives according to an economy;
they live in commerce, not in isolation. Despite the
socio-mythology to the contrary, capitalist life demands a
social network, not rugged individualism. Both success and
failure, lives of comfort and lives of misery, are social
phenomena. This means that people who do not have enough
to eat in a society in which there is enough food to go
around are both hungry and victimized. Marx worked out
this idea more fully. He claimed that the circumstances of
equality begin in the circumstances of work; where a
person stands in economic relation to what a person does to
live determines the class of the person ("Wage Labor and
Capital" 80). Those who stand in positions of employees,
and who can see but cannot have the full worth of their own
labor, stand in positions of exploitation. Thus, Marx
said, "the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the
population" ("Manifesto" 42) because to be put in the
position of reduced compensation is to be rendered into a
class. (In this sense, ostensibly, no equation of money
into labor ever achieves parity, which seems true enough.)
Class, in other words, does not precede life but is an
instrument of a capitalist economy. To understand the
18
American class system, therefore, is to understand American
work.
Complicating an understanding of American work is the
fact that work has changed. Stanley Aronowitz, author of
The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and
Culture in Marxist Theory, observes, for example, that "the
old working class . . . has now all but passed into history
in the United States" (83). (Aronowitz figures prominently
in future discussions of work in this study.) What
Aronowitz sees in the place of past history is a "third
industrial revolution, now underway in the most
technologically advanced countries [which] implies a
j
transformation of the nature, but also of the character, of
labor" (83).
This transformation in the structural bases of
capitalist labor merits widespread consideration.
Observers comment on changes in daily business procedures
as well as adaptive behaviors in psychological relations.
For example, Martin Oppenheimer believes that until
recently high job esteem resided in "professionalism,"
which meant
work involving discretion and judgment . . . work
in which the worker produces an entire product,
be it a painting, a surgical operation, a book, a
bridge, or an idea; where the worker's pace, work
place conditions, product, its use (and even to a
degree its price) are largely determined by the
worker. . . . (38)
19
Much work now, especially middle class work, is
characterized by the deterioration of such factors.
Professionalism has lost out to credentialism. Richard
Sennett understands the loss to result in personal feelings
of indignity, "an increase in men's feelings of
meaninglessness in their actions" (259). Similarly, Dale
Johnson and Christin O'Donnell describe the
"dequalification" of middle class work, a blanket collapse
"from relative independence to dependence, from
superordination to subordination, from job security to
underemployment in terms of education and skill level
attained, and from economic well-being to relatively
reduced levels of income" (230).
The overall reassessment of labor yields a state of
deauthorized autonomy and supervised fragmentation.
Aronowitz catches the distinction between empowered and
dequalified labor in a contrast between technologist and
technician. A technician, he says, "performs rationalized
labor whose nature is disguised by its limited supervisory
function and responsibility, on the one hand, and the
credentializing system that constitutes a prerequisite on
the other" (False Promises 307). The result, Aronowitz
says, is a "degradation" of the idea of skill as well as a
change in the meaning of skill (Crisis 83).
While Aronowitz and others see the change in work,
relatively little has been done to document those changes.
20
As Daniel Bell in The Coining of Post-Industrial Society
states, the confusion about the change in the nature of
work results from an inability to "define exactly what is
changing" (42). Aronowitz, too, submits that the old
scales which measured work, scales such as labor time,
neither measure current products of work nor select workers
(Crisis 83).
Thus, broadly speaking, Bell and Aronowitz share tacit
agreements about the source of economic change but neither
examines the source. The failure to examine, of course,
works in the favor of one and to the detriment of the
other. Bell and Aronowitz are useful to this discussion
because each believes the changes in the basis of the
economy (the home of this industry-to-information shift) to
be radical, their consequences explosive. The old basis
identified workers' positions in the economy mostly
according to profit quotas. People who spun cotton thread
in textile mills, for example, produced profit in terms of
the volume of cotton they used, the time they spent at
their machines, the hourly wages they drew. Managers, on
the other hand, produced profit by managing the
relationships between workers, hours and machines.
Information changes all that. Not only does an
information age bring with it robots who replace weavers
and spinners (or who at least drastically reduce their
numbers) but it changes all the relationships. People and
21
words present new relationships. Crudely, profit quotas
cannot be hung on word output. Creativity— what can be
done with information— complicates the scene even more.
Where there was always the need to creatively manage other
people's output, as well as one's own, managing information
requires wholesale reconsideration of time, output, logic -
- literacy. Many people can be word-crunchers; their
t
quotas of words and quotas of profit change little from old
scales. But, in an information age, the further away work
gets from literate monotony (on both ends of the scale),
the hazier and more problematic quotas of profit become.
(We might also acknowledge, while we are at it, that word-
crunching bears only a surface resemblance to old scales.
People who endure prolonged contact with word processors
and printouts have trouble with their eyes and backs,
especially people who have little to say about the words
they are inputting or the printouts they peruse.)
To a large extent, these are generalities on which
Bell and Aronowitz agree. Their attitudes about them
differ sharply, however, and to understand them is to
appreciate the kind of theoretical confusion that surrounds
many discussions of information.
Bell, in his most didactic and blase style, typifies
the confusion. Information, for him, is an interchangeable
notion with knowledge, knowledge an interchangeable notion
with science and technology. Thus Bell's definition of
22
knowledge expressly denies fields of "news and
entertainment" to embrace mechanistic, quantifiable
scientific data; in his words, knowledge is
a set of organized statements of acts or ideas,
presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental
result, which is transmitted to others through
some communication medium in some systematic
form. (175)
Knowledge underwrites science and technology which
underwrites information. It possesses a mystique which in
turn is possessed by "those in knowledge production"—
according to Aronowitz (Crisis 81). Others revere
knowledge so much as to discard the term. Jeremy Campbell,
in Grammatical Man, Information Entropy Language and Life,
claims that to the "powerful theories of chemistry and
physics [science and technology] must be added a late
arrival: a theory of information. Nature must be
interpreted as matter, energy, and information" (16).
Business analysts, as market and general-appeal
publications attest, can hardly contain the possibilities
for information systems that store not just information but
other systems of storage.
Obviously, these cross-identifications indicate
problems though moreso for some than others. Before we
trace the theoretical difficulties caused by such (reified)
ideas of knowledge, let us return to Bell and Aronowitz to
understand how the shift to an information economy relates
to changes in class structure. Those changes, after all,
23
happen according to theories whether or not particular
theoreticians are able to pierce them.
A r o n o w i t z i s c o n c e r n e d t o a c c o u n t f o r t h e
disappearance of certain classes within the transforming
s y s t e m o f W e s t e r n c a p i t a l i s m , a s y s t e m w h i c h h e k n o w s
n e i t h e r l o s e s n o r e q u a l i z e s m e m b e r s o f t h e s e c l a s s e s b u t
s h o v e s t h e m a s i d e . He s e e s , h o w e v e r , a f a i l u r e i n m uch
reasoning about class structure to account for these
devaluations of standards of living; he is most concerned
with the failure of Marxist explanations. As he says,
Marxism has not only been unable to theorize the
role of the 'middle strata' in modern capitalism
in a manner appropriate to changes in the
relation of knowledge to the production or to the
question entailed by the advent of consumer
society, it has also been unable to theorize the
formation of the new underclass in advanced
capitalist societies. (Crisis 90)
Thus, Aronowitz expresses awareness and bafflement of a
marginalization that moves not merely upward and downward
but laterally, also.
Andrew Kopkind draws close to Aronowitz's observations
when he describes an American social class of "service
managers, franchise workers, and venture capitalists" who
sit "on a huge underclass of burger wrappers and security
guards" (451). The constitution of these "classes" is both
disparate and unstable yet divided in curious,
unprecendented ways. The venture capitalist of today
counts among his assets his access to knowledge; burger
24
wrappers are the information poor; they may not be the
usual poor, however. They may be entirely new groups of
people. Yet, in spite of an awareness of emergent groups,
Aronowitz and Kopkind are left with powerful and original
assertions but insufficient ways to explain them.
Aronowitz knows that the blue collar/white collar
division no longer describes class divisions: "It is a
category of social ideology rather than of social science"
(False Promises 294). Stereotypical white collar office
situations, for example, have deteriorated (especially for
women) into rooms of "deafening" key punch noise; and
whereas secretaries and bosses may lunch together (echoes
of Warner) they do not share class (False Promises 291-
292) .
Bell's scenario, on the other hand, welcomes ambiguity
in class divisions; increasing numbers of divisions,
indeed, negate a class society (echoes, again, of Warner,
the Lynds, etc.). Information is free to be had, it is
ubiquitous, it is endless. The only issue for Bell is how
the commodity, this knowledge, is to be distributed. For
Aronowitz, who believes, too, that "knowledge has become
the main productive force" (Crisis 83), the dilemma is
similar. "To combat . . . inequality," he (and Henry
Giroux) says, "students require knowledge (of which skills
are derivative) and, most of all, hope in their collective
powers to change the world ..." (Aronowitz and Giroux
25
66). But, he gets no farther than the realization that
students of the underclasses do not get it. At one point
Aronowitz asserts that class is a matter of "exclusion from
the mainstream of economic life" (False Promises 11);
today, he could easily substitute "knowledge" for economic
life, for knowledge is access, certain kinds of knowledge
premium.
How, we have to ask, have Bell and Aronowitz
elucidated sources of socio-economic transformation on
which both agree yet which stymie Aronowitz while spurring
the optimism of Bell? Aronowitz believes that mechanisms
of information hook into mechanisms of domination; Bell
asserts the opposite. The answer lies in their common
(earlier broached) definition of knowledge, aka,
information.
Knowledge, for both Aronowitz and Bell, is stuff, a
body of information. It assumes two forms. First, it is
digital. Second, it is acquired via command and demand.
It works in channels, input-output. Input comes from the
top and fills the vessel at the bottom— or moves from
storage container to storage container. The transfer is
essentially passive. This overstates Aronowitz's position,
but not much. When he (and Giroux) blames much of the
literacy crisis on overcrowded classrooms, lack of books
and weary administrators and teachers (Aronowitz and Giroux
64), he essentially falls into the knowledge-out-there
26
s y n d r o m e . F o r b o t h B e l l a n d A r o n o w i t z , t h e r e f o r e , a s k i n g
f o r a n d r e c e i v i n g k n o w l e d g e a r e d i f f e r e n t s i d e s o f t h e sa m e
c o i n — a p e r s o n who w a n t s k n o w l e d g e i s a p e r s o n who g e t s i t .
T h i s s e t o f c i r c u m s t a n c e s i s i d e a l f o r B e l l . P e o p l e
w i l l g e t k n o w l e d g e b y g e t t i n g e d u c a t e d . T h o s e who g e t
e d u c a t e d b e s t w i l l b e t h o s e who g e t t h e m o s t k n o w l e d g e a n d
w ho c a n h a n d l e i t m o s t c l e v e r l y and e f f i c i e n t l y . T h o s e
f o l k s w i l l b e t h e s u c c e s s f u l i n d i v i d u a l s a n d w i l l s i t a t
t h e t o p o f t h e s o c i a l h e a p . The h e a p , h o w e v e r , w i l l i t s e l f
s m a r t e n u p ; i f e d u c a t i o n d o e s i t s j o b , s o c i e t y w i l l b e c o m e
a m e r i t o c r a c y , w h i c h e d u c a t i o n a l r e a d y ( o r s h o u l d b e ) i s .
A s h e s a y s ,
Questions of inequality have little to do with
the issue of meritocracy— if we define a
meritocracy as those who have earned status or
have achieved authority by competence. (27)
On t h i s b a s i s , t h e r e f o r e , u n s u c c e s s f u l o r u n c l e v e r p e o p l e
g e t w h a t t h e y d e s e r v e . B e l l i s f u l l y c o m m i t t e d t o t h e i d e a
t h a t t h e A m e r i c a n s o c i e t y w i l l n e e d "an i n t e l l i g e n c i a " who
c a n h a n d l e c o n c e p t s a n d a w h o l e o t h e r g r o u p who c a n h a n d l e
data (43). The remedy for those whose lives and
l i v e l i h o o d s a r e d i s p o s s e s s e d b y s c i e n c e a n d t e c h n o l o g y i s
a l s o c l e a r : t h e y m u s t r e - p o s s e s s , r e t r a i n , r e - t o o l ,
r e s k i l l t h e m s e l v e s i n t h e k n o w l e d g e o f s c i e n c e a n d
t e c h n o l o g y — t h e s t u f f o f t h e A m e r i c a n d r e a m .
I n t h i s w a y , o f c o u r s e , w i t h i n t h e B e l l s c e n a r i o ,
k n o w l e d g e d o e s n o t m e r e l y p r e s e r v e t h e s t a t u s q u o ; i t
27
creates it and effectively explains the underclass remarked
by Aronowitz and Kopkind. People who do not avail
themselves of the new knowledge are the people who drop
out, or down, as the case may be, to the levels of the
under-and-unemployed. Michael Harrington in an updated
Afterword to The Other America identified a population of
between seven to 19 million people who ostensibly chose not
to re-educate themselves and to remain laid-off and
impoverished; their numbers appear required by 'normal'
free enterprise (214).
K n o w l e d g e r e p o s s e s s i o n i s t o u g h , A r o n o w i t z a n d K o p k in d
w o u l d n o d o u b t a g r e e . B u t i t i s e q u a l l y t o u g h t o o v e r l o o k
t h i s p e c u l i a r p h e n o m e n o n o f m a s s s e l f - d e s t r u c t i o n . Why
w o u l d s o m any p e o p l e c h o o s e t o d i s q u a l i f y t h e m s e l v e s f r o m
t h e p o s s i b i l i t i e s o f l a b o r ? E q u a l l y a s o d d , why d o s u c h
g r e a t n u m b e r s o f p e o p l e c h o o s e t o a t t a i n a m inim um k i n d o f
k n o w l e d g e t h a t p u t s t h e m i n p o s i t i o n s , a s A r o n o w i t z s a y s ,
"of social labor that is fragmented, degraded, and
stratified, just like the private corporate sector" (Crisis
183). In the face of the promise of "equal information"
are we to assume that large groups of people watch
passively as their economic security, psychological well
being, and standards of living erode?
Science and technology and the information revolution
they breed are not forms of liberation but another form of
domination. Science and technology merely disguise
28
"factory-like” conditions in technical, even "upscale"
professions. This according to Aronowitz (False Promises
294). The issue, therefore, for Aronowitz and Bell and for
us, is not how "technical" information gives access to
greater freedom and opportunity but how it takes it away.
T he a n s w e r b e g i n s w i t h a n o n p o s i t i v i s t t h e o r y o f
k n o w l e d g e . I f k n o w l e d g e i s n o t a t h i n g b u t an a c t , a n d
p e o p l e l e a r n n o t b y b e i n g b u t b y a c t i n g , t h e n t h e s t a t u s o f
k n o w l e d g e d e p e n d s o n t h e s t a t u s o f t h e a c t o r s . K n o w l e d g e
i s n o t e v e n n e c e s s a r i l y l i n g u i s t i c ; so m e a c t s d o n o t
r e q u i r e w o r d s . F u r t h e r m o r e , k n o w l e d g e a s s u m e s h i s t o r i c a l
a c t i n g ; h i s t o r y c o m e s t o b e m ade a n d r e m a d e a n d v a r i e s i n
i t s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n a s s o c i e t i e s v a r y i n t h e i r u p k e e p . The
o p p o r t u n i t i e s t o know d e p e n d o n t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p s p e o p l e
m a i n t a i n , t h e t y p e s o f o p p o r t u n i t i e s t h e y h a v e t o g a i n
a c c e s s t o s o u r c e s o f k n o w l e d g e , t h e c u l t u r e a n d e x p e r i e n c e s
t h e y b r i n g t o l e a r n i n g , a n d t h e s a n c t i o n s o r m e a s u r e s t h a t
g o v e r n p o s s i b l e c o n s e q u e n c e s .
T he i n t e r c h a n g e s s o d e s c r i b e d r e p r e s e n t c o m p l e x
s i t u a t i o n s t h a t r e q u i r e e x t e n s i v e e x a m i n a t i o n . The
f o l l o w i n g c h a p t e r s a r e an a t t e m p t t o o p e n s u c h an
e x a m i n a t i o n b y l o o k i n g a t how we l o o k a t l i t e r a c y , t h e
t h e o r i e s a b o u t l i t e r a c y we w e a v e , a n d t h e w a y s we p r e s u m e
t o p r o g r a m l i t e r a c y i n t o t h e l i v e s o f s o c i a l g r o u p s a n d t h e
p e o p l e who m ake t h e m u p . F o r n o w , h o w e v e r , l e t u s f o c u s o n
t h e i m p l i c a t i o n s o f t h e s e s t a t i c d e f i n i t i o n s o f k n o w l e d g e
29
( a n d i t s a l i a s e s — i n f o r m a t i o n , s c i e n c e a n d t e c h n o l o g y ,
c o m p u t e r i z a t i o n , d a t a , a n d s o o n ) f o r t h e e c o n o m y .
The i m p l i c a t i o n s a r e b r o a d , o f c o u r s e ; u l t i m a t e l y ,
t h i s a n a l y s i s a s s e r t s t h a t t h e y a r e o m i n o u s . We m i g h t
a n t i c i p a t e f u t u r e d e v o l u t i o n s o f c u r r e n t p o s i t i o n s t o
p h r a s e t h e q u e s t i o n ( a l m o s t ) c a v a l i e r l y ; How m i g h t a
c a p i t a l i s t s y s t e m d e a l w i t h a c o n t e x t u a l t h e o r y o f
k n o w l e d g e ? T he q u e s t i o n p r e s u m e s a p o w e r f u l c a p i t a l i s t
i n t e r e s t .
S i n c e k n o w l e d g e w i t h i n a c a p i t a l i s t e c o n o m y i s u s e f u l
i n a c c o r d a n c e w i t h t h e n e e d s a n d a i m s o f p r i v a t e p r o f i t ,
t h e n t h e w ay t o c o n t r o l k n o w l e d g e i s t o r e g u l a t e a c c e s s a n d
r i g i d i f y f u n c t i o n , t o c o - o p t t h e c o n t e x t , i n o t h e r w o r d s .
A b r i e f g l a n c e a t a d a t a i n p u t c e n t e r i n a l a r g e
c o r p o r a t i o n g i v e s c o r r o b o r a t i v e , i f c i r c u m s t a n t i a l ,
e v i d e n c e o f t h i s . To u n d e r s t a n d how t h e p r o c e s s e s o f
l e a r n i n g , o f g e t t i n g k n o w l e d g e , c a n b e s u b v e r t e d i s t o
u n d e r s t a n d t h e r o l e o f l i t e r a c y i n a d a t a - i n p u t s o c i e t y .
The A m e r i c a n s o c i e t y i s a l i t e r a t e s o c i e t y . O r a l
l a n g u a g e c o m m u n i c a t i o n i s n o t e s t e e m e d i n t h e c a p i t a l i s t i c
( e s p e c i a l l y l e g a l i s t ) e c o n o m y w h e r e a s l i t e r a t e f o r m s o f
c o m m u n i c a t i o n a r e . V a l i d c o m m u n i c a t i o n i s w r i t t e n t e x t .
V a l i d u s e s — i . e . , p r o f i t a b l e o n e s — o f c o m m u n i c a t i o n r e q u i r e
l i t e r a c y . T o d a y , t h e l i n k b e t w e e n d e c i s i o n s a b o u t c a p i t a l
a n d d e c i s i o n s a b o u t s o c i a l , e c o n o m i c i n t e r c o u r s e i s
l i t e r a c y . L i t e r a c y i s t h e l a n g u a g e o f p r o f i t ; i n A m e r i c a ,
30
profit begs text. As Aronowitz says, "reading and writing
are conditions of survival ..." ("Toward Redefining
Literacy" 54).
L i t e r a c y , i f n o t h i n g e l s e , i s t h e c o n d i t i o n o f p o s t
i n d u s t r i a l i s m . A w o r k e r ' s p o s s i b i l i t i e s a r e c o n t a i n e d b y
h i s a b i l i t y t o n e g o t i a t e s u b j e c t s o f c a p i t a l . I n
c o n t e m p o r a r y c a p i t a l i s m i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , t h e n , t h e
p r i m a r y r e l a t i o n t o l i t e r a c y i s c l a s s . T h u s , t h e r e
o r g a n i z a t i o n o f l i t e r a c y i s u n s u r p r i s i n g .
T h i s r e o r g a n i z a t i o n o f l i t e r a c y , o r a s D a l e J o h n s o n
h a s s a i d , t h e d e q u a l i f i c a t i o n o f l i t e r a c y , i s n o t t h e o n l y
t a s k o f n ew m a n a g e m e n t , o f c o u r s e . T h e r e i s n e e d , a s B e l l
s a y s , f o r h i g h l y s o p h i s t i c a t e d l e v e l s o f l i t e r a c y a s w e l l
a s p e r f u n c t o r y r e l a t i o n s h i p s . On an a x i s s u c h a s l i t e r a c y ,
t h e r a n g e i s a s g r e a t a s t h e c a t e g o r i e s a r e m a n i p u t a b l e .
L i t e r a c i e s c a n r a n g e f r o m a t y p e w h i c h h a n d l e r s o f d a t a
m i g h t n e e d t o a r e q u i s i t e i l l i t e r a c y w h i c h e n t a i l s
e x c l u s i o n f r o m p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n t h e b e n e f i t s o f k n o w l e d g e
a l t o g e t h e r . No m a t t e r how m uch i l l i t e r a t e s k n o w , i n o t h e r
w o r d s , i l l i t e r a t e s c o u n t f o r n o t h i n g . T h e r e i s a d i s t a n c e
am ong l i t e r a c i e s ( t h o u g h t h e r e a r e n o i n h e r e n t f e a t u r e s t o
t y p e s o f l i t e r a c i e s ) , a n d t h i s d i s t a n c e p r e f i g u r e s s o c i o
e c o n o m i c c o n s e q u e n c e s . A p p r e c i a t i o n o f t h i s d i s t a n c e ,
f u r t h e r m o r e , h e l p s t o e l u c i d a t e o t h e r , o f t e n a m b i g u o u s ,
m e a s u r e s o f t h e c h a n g e s i n l a b o r s u c h a s l o s s o f a u t o n o m y ,
f r a g m e n t a t i o n o f t a s k s , i s o l a t i o n , n o i s e l e v e l s , a n d s o o n .
31
When these features are reworked as conditions of literacy
they gain a basis as well as a grid whereby to understand
post-industrial work relations. To put it negatively, they
make clear that literacy is not a synonym for knowledge,
that a-literacy is not illiteracy, and that conditions of
literacy differ broadly according to purpose and power.
Literacy is an economic and social regulation; it is
also taught. The functional issue of how literacy comes to
distribute class relations thus involves the ways of
teaching. Theories and pedagogies of literacy set the
perameters for interchange. Acquisition becomes the
mediator of social relations; teaching, the arbiter. This
is to say that literacy is a function of culture, social
experience, and sanction. Literacy education begins in the
ideas of the socially and economically dominant class and
it takes the forms of socially acceptable subjects,
stylistically permissable forms, ranges of difference or
deviance, baselines of gratification. Becoming literate
signifies in large part the ability to conform or, at
least, to appear conformist. The teaching of literacy, in
turn, is a regulation of access.
For example, a recent tact of computer advertising in
the United States is to warn parents that without home-
computerized instruction, children will not get ahead in
school. Actually, the computer may only serve as an
indicator of the advantages already bestowed by a student's
32
class. The book in early 18th century England assumed a
similar status. Almost any book cost ten times what a
laborer made in a week, if not more (Watt 41). The use of
the book, though purportedly to educate the buying family,
merely identified the class of the buyer, not the merit of
the book nor, contrary to popular belief, the illiteracy of
the nonbuyer. The computer, or the book, indexes social
class, not conditions of knowledge. This distinction is
one the confusion of which is promulgated by the
contemporary idealism of literacy.
T h u s , t h e c o n c e p t o f l i t e r a c y t h a t a n i m a t e s B e l l a n d
s t y m i e s A r o n o w i t z b o i l s dow n t o d a i l y r e a l i t i e s a n d
t r a n s l a t e s r a t h e r t h a n t r a n s f o r m s l a b o r r e l a t i o n s . New
k n o w l e d g e p r o m i s e s new o p p o r t u n i t y , b u t n o n ew e q u a l i t y
a p p e a r s i m m i n e n t . B e l l , o f c o u r s e , f i g u r e s t h a t m any h a v e
a s y e t t o a v a i l t h e m s e l v e s o f t h e k n o w l e d g e e x t a n t .
A r o n o w i t z c a n n o t s u p p o r t s u c h a s e x p l a n a t i o n .
I n t h e p a s t , w h en c l a s s w a s s u p p o s e d l y e a s i e r t o s e e
( r a c i a l s t r u c t u r e s , a s w e l l ) , i t a l w a y s w o r k e d o u t
p r e d i c t a b l y t h a t c h i l d r e n o f m i l l l i f e d i d n o t l e a r n t o
r e a d a n d w r i t e v e r y w e l l and s o w e n t t o t h e i r n a t u r a l
c a l l i n g . C h i l d r e n who d i d b e c o m e s t a n d a r d i z e d l i t e r a t e s
w e r e n a t u r a l l y c a l l e d t o d e s k s , o n t h e o t h e r h a n d . O t h e r s
d i d n o t g e t a s f a r a s h a v i n g t h e o p t i o n . Now t h a t c l a s s i s
m o r e d i f f i c u l t t o t r a c k d o w n , a n d m any who w e r e a l w a y s
p r e s u m e d t o b e i n t h e p r o t e c t e d c l a s s e s a r e l o s i n g t h a t
33
protection, the mechanism for distribution appears to fall
into question. A reassessment of that mechanism, however,
might reveal less a disintegration of class lines than a
retrenchment along those lines, so that socio-economic
opportunities which different groups of students might find
and do and look forward to may change but the groups
themselves shift only slightly. As the margins grow wider,
of course, the freedoms grow narrower. How this happens,
relevant to an axis of literacy, presents an interesting
question.
Where it happens, of course, is in school. It is to
institutionalized American education, therefore, that the
argument turns next.
34
II: The Ideology of Literacy
T he w a y s i n w h i c h ~ l i t e r a c y i s t h o u g h t a b o u t i n t h i s
country are reductive and dangerous. In their application,
they narrow the range of pedagogy and suppress the
possibilities of research. This is the real literacy
crisis. The purpose of the following chapter is to
understand how an often silent but powerful ideology
operates within the structures of American theories and
t h e o r i z i n g a b o u t l i t e r a c y .
B e c a u s e i d e o l o g y i s a t e r m t h a t b r i n g s w i t h i t a l o t
of baggage, a brief account of its use here seems in order.
P e r h a p s t h e m o s t n e u t r a l w ay t o s p e a k o f a n i d e o l o g y i s a s
a "system of ideas" (Poulantzas 17). Max Weber elaborates,
m a i n t a i n i n g a m i l d l y a b s t r a c t y e t d e f i n i t i v e s t a n c e . I n
The Methodology of the Social Sciences he describes how
there can be no selection or interpretation of empirical
data without reference to "evaluative ideas" which are not
t h e m s e l v e s d e d u c i b l e f r o m e m p i r i c a l d a t a : "The
'objectivity' of the social sciences depends rather on the
fact that the empirical data is derived from these
evaluative ideas" (111). A more highly politicized version
supplied by Terry Eagleton seems more appropriate to the
i s s u e s a t h a n d , h o w e v e r . E a g l e t o n ' s a t t r a c t i o n i s t o t h e
domination of ideology which he calls
a relatively coherent set of 'discourses' of
values, representations and beliefs which [are]
35
realised in certain material apparatuses and
related to the structures of material production
so to reflect the experiential relations of
individual subjects to their social conditions as
to guarantee those misperceptions of the 'real'
which contribute to the reproduction of the
dominant social relations. (54)
Eagleton is never one to be succinct, yet he targets the
grave danger of ideologies: they tend to subsume ideas
according to powerful interests.
I d e o l o g y i n l i t e r a c y c a r r i e s w i t h i t r a m i f i c a t i o n s .
First, many researchers appear ignorant or arrogant of the
i d e o l o g i c a l f r a m e w o r k s i n w h i c h t h e y w o r k . T h e y w o u ld
like, as Eagleton says of historical materialists, to be
allowed to step "outside the terrain of competing 'long
perspectives' in order to theorise the conditions of their
possibility" (16). This view, Eagleton observes, is a
c o n v e n i e n t b u t q u e s t i o n a b l e v i e w . M ore s e r i o u s l y , s o m e
researchers seem unable or unwilling to view the
frustration of their work as ideologically tolerable; thus,
t h e y s h a p e t h e i r w o r k t o f i t t h e i d e o l o g y . E a g l e t o n
r e q u i r e s m o r e t h a n t h i s . He c o n c l u d e s ,
the moment when a material or intellectual
practice begins to 'think itself,' to take itself
as an object of intellectual inquiry, is clearly
of dominant significance in the development of
that practice; it will certainly never be the
same again. (17)
The practice of researching literacy and the uses we re
assert or invent for it have changed their object just as
they have changed each other.
36
One o f t h e c l e a r e s t i d e o l o g i c a l i s s u e s we m u s t f i n a l l y
a d d r e s s i s t h e i m p e t u s f o r s u c h c h a n g e .
The issue of literacy to the extent that it supercedes
most other educational issues entered the national
consciousness in the early seventies. The most prescient
American study to date of the meaning of literacy was
published in 1981. The Psychology of Literacy by Sylvia
Scribner and Michael Cole consists of a multi-faceted
investigation of the Vai people of Liberia. The
investigation has had great impact, not the least for its
correlative ability to articulate central Western beliefs
about the effects of literacy. Its shift toward a culture-
relative understanding of literacy is a second appeal.
Another aspect of the study, however, renders the
investigation most interesting for our purposes and that is
the curious duality of the conclusions. As the present
analysis will argue, it is this duality, often consisting
of direct contradiction, that proves most instructive.
Within Scribner and Cole’s study, the implications for
a complete revision of thinking about literacy are in open
evidence. They begin in, and are beholden to, several
features: a rigorous, inter-disciplinary method, clear
enunciation of the original questions, and acknowledgment
of the difficulties the conceptual nuances pose. To ensure
as much accuracy and integrity as possible in gathering
data, Scribner and Cole combine the usual
37
testing/experimental plans of cognitive psychology (Forced-
Choice Longest-Word test, for example), with interviews,
questionnaires, and ethnographic observation "in the hope
that each [method] might check and supplement the other"
(22). They do so in recognition of the "covariation of
literacy" with all aspects of social life, aspects which
present "a formidable obstacle to research on educational
effects, and a point to which we will constantly return"
(10). The tight weave among social strands of
"educational" life is precisely what Scribner and Cole
would like to loosen in order to inspect. Theirs, too, is
the longstanding hypothesis "that literacy introduces a
great divide among human societies," (4) but their interest
is to distinguish the features which might exist alongside
this divide. The overall question is formulated thus: "Is
literacy a surrogate for schooling?" (20) If it is or is
not, they hope to be able to characterize the separatism,
to
demonstrate an association between antecedent
literacy practices and consequent cognitive
performance, and to do so under analytic
conditions that would clearly establish literacy
as a causal factor. (18)
The priority emphasis on cognition, of course, may
itself hamper more than aid the progress, but the
probability for demarcation among kinds of effects
(skills)— cognitive versus social versus types of
cognicity— appears greater in the Vai society than in most.
38
T h i s i s why S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e c h o o s e t h e V a i , who p r e s e n t a
s p e c i a l s e t t i n g t h a t s u g g e s t s a n a t u r a l s e p a r a t i o n b e t w e e n
s c h o o l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y a n d a l s o a f f o r d s t h e o p p o r t u n i t y t o
m e a s u r e o r e v a l u a t e t h e c o n s e q u e n c e o f e a c h " c a u s e . " As
S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e p u t i t ,
We were drawn to Vai society in the first place
because we hoped that the existence of an
indigenous script, transmitted outside of an
institutional setting and having no connection
with Western-type school, would make it possible
to disentangle literacy effects from school
effects. (19)
T h e y p r e s u m e d t o c a p i t a l i z e , i n e f f e c t , o n a u n i q u e
l a b o r a t o r y t y p e s i t u a t i o n w h i c h c o u l d i n f o r m W e s t e r n
i n s t i t u t i o n s a s t o t h e e x t r i c a b i l i t y o f t h e f u n c t i o n s o f
e d u c a t i o n .
T he s t u d y S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e c o n d u c t e d w a s b r o a d a n d
t h o r o u g h . T he r e s e a r c h e r s d i d n o t s h y a w a y f r o m t o u g h
q u e s t i o n s ; t h e y a d d r e s s e d i s s u e s o f m e t a - 1 i n g u i s t i c a b i l i t y
a s w e l l a s v a r i a t i o n i n d i r e c t i o n - g i v i n g e x p e r t i s e , f o r
e x a m p l e , am ong V a i l i t e r a t e s , n o n - l i t e r a t e s , a n d s c h o o l e d
b i - l i t e r a t e s . A t a l m o s t e v e r y t u r n , S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e t o o k
c a r e t o e x a m i n e t h e p u r p o s e s o f t h e i r t e s t s , a n d a s t h e y
r e p o r t , m o r e t h a n o n c e c h a n g e d t h e d i r e c t i o n o f r e s e a r c h .
S o , i t i s m o m e n t o u s w h e n , a t t h e e n d o f t h e p r o c e s s , t h e y
a n n o u n c e a d e a r t h o f r e s u l t s . I n t h e i r w o r d s , " I f we w e r e
t o r e g a r d o n l y g e n e r a l c o n s e q u e n c e s a s w o r t h y o f s e r i o u s
a t t e n t i o n , we w o u l d h a v e t o d i s m i s s t h e l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s
am ong t h e V a i a s b e i n g o f l i t t l e p s y c h o l o g i c a l i n t e r e s t "
39
(324). At a later point, they conclude a discussion of
c o r r e l a t i o n s b e t w e e n u n s c h o o l e d V a i l i t e r a c y a n d g e n e r a l
ability tasks with an equally hapless response:
Vai script literacy was associated with modest
contributions on three general ability tasks:
experts who taught the script showed a preference
for form or number in sorting geometric figures;
Vai script reading score contributed to
performance on story recall and language
objectivity tasks in one of their
administrations; Vai script letter writing was
associated with more categorical choices of food
items. We have no principled explanations of
these spotty effects. (344)
To be sure, Scribner and Cole found more logical effects
associated with Vai script literacy when it was associated
with other literacies and school. Vai script literates
could use "graphic symbols to represent language" and use
"language as a means of instruction" in discussion of, say,
grammar or board-game rules (254). Vai literates, in other
words, could talk about Vai script in ways that Vai non
literates could not.
However, Scribner and Cole found that non-literates
performed as well or better than literates on many tasks,
even those specific to literacy technology: "Even on tasks
closely related to script activities, such as reading or
writing with pictures, some nonliterates did as well as
those with school or literacy experience" (251). Scribner
and Cole could only conclude that "literacy promotes skills
among the Vai but we cannot and do not claim that literacy
is a necessary and sufficient condition for any of the
40
skills we assessed" (251). The assertion is remarkable for
a study which set out to discover the effects of an
"antecedent" literacy.
In one sense, Scribner and Cole's book should end
here. That it does not is partly attributable to its
originality— no one had tried to examine literacy in these
ways before. Vai culture suggests to Scribner and Cole,
however, that literacy means something else, so they
c o n t i n u e t h e s t u d y i n s e a r c h o f t h a t . T h e y p r o p o s e t h a t
l i t e r a c y i s a l w a y s b o u n d up w i t h a p r a c t i c e . The i d e a o f
practice, they say,
guides the way we seek to understand literacy.
Instead of focusing exclusively on the technology
of a writing system and its reputed consequences
. . . we approach literacy as a set of organized
practices which make use of a symbol system and a
technology for producing it. . . . The nature of
these practices, including, of course, their
technological aspects, will determine the kinds
of skills [consequences] associated with
literacy. (236)
In a more strongly worded and potentially explosive
s t a t e m e n t t h e y a s s e r t t h a t " i n q u i r i e s i n t o t h e c o g n i t i v e
consequences of literacy are inquiries into the impact of
socially organized practices in other domains" (237;
e m p h a s i s a d d e d ) . T h e y d i s c l a i m , t h e r e b y , t h e n o t i o n o f an
insular literacy. Literacy amounts to a technology whose
nature is always social, or, at least, always socially
derived and socially defined. This exigence, moreover, is
s p e c i f i c a n d r o o t e d :
41
In order to identify the consequences of
literacy, we need to consider the specific
characteristics of specific practices. And, in
order to conduct such an analysis, we need to
understand the larger social system that
generates certain kinds of practices (and not
others). (237)
Literacy is cognitively superfluous; its cognitive effects,
at best, are "spotty" and unexplainable.
The question that arises harbors itself. Are there
any effects of literacy or are all effects in which
literacy is involved other effects? Scribner and Cole ask
this rhetorically:
Can we bring our evidence of localized and
specific changes [attributed to literacy] into
relation with scholars' grand speculations about
literacy and thought? Or is there no meeting
ground between the two sets of terms? (234)
Though recondite, an answer is not impossible within the
d a t a S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e h a v e a m a s s e d . To p u r s u e i t ,
however, requires something very much like stopping in
o n e ' s t r a c k s u p o n t h e s u d d e n r e a l i z a t i o n t h a t t h e p a t h s
have been circular. If literacy is not an explanatory
principle for a practice, then what explains literacy?
What is the practice of a society which practices literacy,
and what, then, would literacy mean? These certainly are
t h e k i n d s o f q u e s t i o n s t o b e m u l l e d o v e r . F a c e d w i t h t h e m ,
Scribner and Cole retreat.
As indicated earlier, when literacy could not be found
to produce much of anything useful, Scribner and Cole tried
to expand their field of investigation. Unfortunately,
42
they did not abandon their awe of literacy:
[We] were unwilling to abandon the possibility
that there might be some form of pervasive
intellectual changes related to literacy per se.
Turning away from developmental theorizing about
higher-order thinking and memory skills, we
decided to examine cognitive change in domains
more closely related to acquisition and use of
written language. (134)
I n c e r t a i n r e s p e c t s , S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e ' s t e n a c i t y i s
a d m i r a b l e . T h e i r r e t r e n c h m e n t , h o w e v e r , p r o m i s e s l i t t l e .
T h e y a l r e a d y know t h a t t h e r e s u l t s o f l i t e r a c y - s p e c i f i c
t e s t i n g a r e u n c l e a r a n d n a r r o w . Y e t t h e y c o n c l u d e by
- forcing a statement unsupported by their own study:
" H o w e v e r m o d e s t a n d s p e c i a l i z e d t h e o u t c o m e s , o u r s t u d i e s
am ong t h e V a i p r o v i d e t h e f i r s t d i r e c t e v i d e n c e t h a t
literacy makes some difference to some skills in some
contexts" (234). The equivocation of "some difference" is
a s m o k e s c r e e n S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e s e n d up a g a i n a n d a g a i n .
What explains the choice to affirm an hypothesis that does
not pan out?
One s o u r c e o f c o n s t r a i n t c a n b e s e e n i n a c u r i o u s
statement that excuses the study for failing to take its
own a d v i c e ; i t o c c u r s j u s t a f t e r S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e h a v e
pronounced the unique, if odd, effects of literacy:
To give a satisfactory account of the nature and
significances of the differences [between
literacies and non-literacies] we found— and
failed to find— we would need to draw on some
well specified theory of cognition, especially a
theory spelling out the mechanism by which social
factors affect cognitive variation. No such
theory was at hand when we commenced our work,
43
and none is at hand today to help us interpret
it. (234)
The very peculiarity of such a statement is puzzling,
except perhaps when one realizes that Scribner and Cole
must be speaking in terms of theories within their own
field; they must require, and be limited by, a social
theory generated by cognitive psychology, which would be a
very strange thing, indeed. They themselves confirm this
limitation. In an appendix to the study, they evidence
awareness of the historical origin and significance of Vai
script. They observe that it possesses the function of
keeping "business" within the community secret from those
outside; they notice that Vai script appears at the
approximate time of nineteenth century imperialism in
Africa. They hypothesize that the social stratification of
script literacy is tied to the agricultural economy. They
even surmise an "ideological value" of script "in
traditional activities, pragmatic values in trade, and
political values . . . in a region beset by local
colonization and foreign penetration" (269). Yet, they
say, "no direct evidence supports [our] speculation," and
they aver to the speculations of others to explain the life
of the script (269). They reduce what they cannot explain
to the inexplicable.
This observation is less a criticism of Scribner and
Cole than it is a lament over the confines of traditional
44
academic disciplines. In restrospect, it is easy to see
how the assumptions and traditions of one discipline come
to dominate an entire undertaking, even those aspects which
seemed extra-disciplinary. This body of thought imports a
psychological determination of cognition such that
interpretations about literacy have remained within the
cognitive dicta. Unfortunately, cognition is not itself an
arbitrary fact. It, too, comes out of a social matrix and
is interwoven with the social life that cognizes, or
evaluates, effects. The notion that a society can be
divied up according to its cognitive performances
diminishes the importance of society while it elevates
individual psychology. In Scribner and Cole's study, the
content of the Vai society does not materialize. The Vai
have already been taxonomized according to formal
properties, in this case variant literacies, before the Vai
are met. This neglect of society suggests precisely the
y
questions to raise about Scribner and Cole and many other
literacy researchers: What is the researchers1 culture?
What are their assumptions? On what economic and material
base do they live? Indeed, from what kind of society does
such a taxonomy come and of what use is it to the society
to make separable and separate ideas and kinds of literacy,
cognition, and social relationship or effect?
An explanation entails a re-examination of the meaning
of literacy in Western society, a meaning which is so
45
central to be tacit and so tacit to be manipulative. That
meaning is shot through with capitalist assumptions of what
societies do and how societies organize their
relationships. Underlying the assumptions is the tacit
understanding that people can be understood in terms of
their uses and that literacy, in particular, can be
understood in terms of its ends. This underlying
assumption, as anti-social as it may be in the Vai society,
runs throughout the commentary on that society. This
assumption operates in two ways.
The first, on the surface, may appear niggling, even
unfair. It is the reliance on the artifact to identify a
literate occasion, an occasion in which speculation about
literacy can go on. Scribner and Cole go to Vai country to
extrapolate from Vai script, and it is Vai script-1iteracy
they invoke to discover pure cognitive effects of a pure,
un-schooled (thus unsocialized?) technology. The Vai print
is the Vai literacy, in other words; wherever there is
print, there is literacy. Scribner and Cole seem to know
the pitfalls of this simplistic attitude, this equation of
the artifact with the literacy. "A piece of writing," they
say, "whatever its form, serves as a flag to signal
activities in the ongoing stream of behavior that may have
some component skills in common" (258; emphasis added).
Yet rather than proceed in the direction this statement
would indicate, to unearth the origin and dictates of these
46
skills, Scribner and Cole close ranks and emphasize, again,
the specific cognitive features attached to discrete
literate occasions. Thus, the thingness of the literacy is
preserved, even if thingness is converted into a conceptual
idea. In fact, such a conversion re-imbeds literacy within
the psychological discipline of Scribner and Cole— literacy
becomes a cognitive structure as it meets psychological
criteria for cognition.
One of those criteria is that cognition be
quantifiable. As a result, Scribner and Cole seem at times
to be caught up in shooting at anything that moves in the
literacy wilderness. Every time they see print, they see
another target. Another result is that the effects of
literacy are "Western" reproductions of Scribner and Cole's
own society. These are the effects they cannot find, much
less quantify. They say,
Vai literacy is not a vehicle for introducing new
ways of life. We have called it literacy without
education because it does not open doors to
vicarious experience, new bodies of knowledge, or
new ways of thinking about major life problems.
(238)
The assumptions here are striking.
Is this what literacy is supposed to do— introduce
vicariousness, import new information or problem-solving
techniques, please or instruct? If literacy does not do
this, does it fail to educate? Educate about what?
Surely, the only possible reply is educate in Western ways,
47
ways of vicarious experience and knowledge- gathering
explicitly linked to literacy. Scribner and Cole can think
of "no educational activity that is mediated by
standardized written matierial in Vai script" (238). More
specifically, and dramatically for us, they are perplexed
that for the Vai, literacy is not a tool that enables one
person to dominate another. They are perplexed to find
that
those who do not know [the Vai script literacy]
get along quite well. We see no evidence that
they are barred from leadership roles in the
social system or from traditional occupations
because they cannot read and write. Vai script
literacy is not essential either to maintain or
to elaborate customary ways of life. (238)
B u t w hy s h o u l d l i t e r a c y b r i n g h a r d s h i p ? T he s o c i e t y o f
Scribner and Cole, not the society of the Vai, is the one
w h i c h s t a k e s m uch o n t h e o p p r e s s i v e p o w e r s o f l i t e r a c y . I n
V a i s o c i e t y , s o m e t h i n g g o e s o n t h a t l o o k s l i k e l i t e r a c y ,
b u t i t d o e s n o t d e l i v e r l i k e W e s t e r n l i t e r a c y .
Scribner and Cole, like the Lynds before them, could
have reconsidered their observations. We might take
another look at the Vai data in terms of possible re
interpretations that may be less impeded by Western
ideology. As Scribner and Cole acknowledge, the Vai script
has a history. Every time the literacy flag goes up, we
can assume history must also be involved. A broad
observation might be that Vai script, given the anti
colonialism of its origin, came into existence to ward off
48
the imperialism or exploitation of foreign colonists. As
Scribner and Cole note, Vai literacy instruction takes
place almost invariably one-on-one, between older males,
and outside of institutions. There are no "standardized"
texts. Reading and writing are "inextricably" linked (67).
The apparent illusiveness of Vai literacy may well be an
assertion of independence.
At the same time, Scribner and Cole discern that Vai
literacy "has not set off dramatic modernizing sequences"
or "become a mass literacy" (238). We might ask, however,
if it ever would have. If in the beginning Vai literacy
hid familiar Vai interests (and economics) from
colonialists, it might not continue to do so, given the
"success" of colonialism. Vai literacy, in other words,
may continue to operate but without original results.
Meanwhile, for the Vai to learn English literacy is to opt
out or, more likely, be forced out, of Vai society. Why
then has Vai literacy persisted?
One would surmise a primary reason to be solidarity
(with due respects to psycho-cultural habits). Another
might be social discontinuity or confusion, or, in fact,
despair. Vai literacy to the Vai may be an allusion to the
past, to a juncture where independence met domination so
where memories of independence both solidify and recall
social demise. Scribner and Cole, for example, note that
the birth mortality rate in Liberia is 50%; a number of the
49
Vai script letters that circulate concern what Scribner and
Cole call "ubiquitous" funerals. Vai life, in other words,
is the subject of Vai literacy; the use is Western only as
the saddest barometer of Western influence.
To the extent that original reasons for analyzing
Scribner and Cole were to appreciate their findings about
literacy and to observe the discords of research and
reporting, this analysis has swung full circle. What, we
ask now, can we conclude from a vast study on literacy
which comes up blank and cannot say it, which generates
fascinating data but cannot process it? We can certainly
conclude that the business of literacy research is pressed
for answers. We can also conclude that literacy
researchers have a vested interest in finding certain kinds
of results. To say of the Vai that literacy has no effects
is tantamount to saying that there is no literacy. That,
however, constitutes an unacceptable conclusion. The full
equation— no effects, no literacy, no society— deconstructs
the entire enterprise.
Scribner and Cole, of course, are not the only
researchers constrained by ideologies of literacy. We
might look at a "purely" American study, Adult Illiteracy
in the United States: A Report to the Ford Foundation by
Carman St. John Hunter and David Harman to see how it
founders along similar divisions of methodology and
practice and fails also to see the basis of the schism.
50
H u n t e r a n d H a rm a n , t o o , a r e h a u n t e d b y d u a l i t i e s s p r u n g
f r o m t h e n e e d t o p r i v a t i z e l i t e r a c y a s w e l l a s r o o t i t i n
t h e s o c i e t y . A p r a g m a t i c d i f f e r e n c e b e t w e e n t h e i r r e p o r t
a n d S c r i b n e r a n d C o l e ' s i s t h a t H u n t e r a n d H arm an a r e i n
p o s i t i o n s t o r e c o m m e n d p r o g r a m s f o r t h e a m e l i o r a t i o n o f t h e
A m e r i c a n s o c i e t y . Y e t t h e i r r e c o m m e n d a t i o n s f u r t h e r a
l e g a c y o f o s c i l l a t i o n c o n t a i n e d a l o n g a v e r t i c a l r a t h e r
t h a n l a t e r a l c o n c e p t i o n o f s o c i a l a c t i o n .
T he f i r s t s t e p H u n t e r a n d Harman t a k e i s t o d i v i d e
l i t e r a c y i n h a l f , i n t o s o m e t h i n g t h e y c a l l c o n v e n t i o n a l
( a l m o s t n e i g h b o r h o o d - s p e c i f i c ) a n d f u n c t i o n a l l i t e r a c y .
T h e d e f i n i t i o n o f f u n c t i o n a l l i t e r a c y c o n c e r n s u s m o s t a s
i t i s t h e d e f i n i t i o n o s t e n s i b l y o p e n t o g e n e r a l i z e d
a d d r e s s . F u n c t i o n a l l i t e r a c y c o n s t i t u t e s
the possession of skills perceived as necessary
by particular persons and groups to fulfill their
own self-determined objectives as family and
community members, citizens, consumers, job
holders, and members of social, religious, or
other associations of their choosing. (17)
A s b r o a d a n d e g a l i t a r i a n a s t h i s d e f i n i t i o n m ay a p p e a r ,
i m p l i c i t w i t h i n i t a r e t h e f a m i l i a r c o n t r a d i c t i o n s . T h e s e
c o n t r a d i c t i o n s a r e b e t w e e n l i t e r a c y a h d s o c i e t y a n d a l s o
b e t w e e n i n d i v i d u a l s i n t h e i r g r o u p s a n d t h e l a r g e r s o c i e t y .
L i t e r a c y i s a " p a r t i c u l a r " s k i l l t o b e d e p l o y e d t o m e e t a
p e r s o n ' s own " s e l f - d e t e r m i n e d o b j e c t i v e s . " T he l o c a t i o n o f
s e l f - d e t e r m i n a t i o n am ong t h e v a r i o u s c o m m u n a l a g e n c i e s
d i f f u s e s t o so m e e x t e n t t h e s e c u l a r i z a t i o n o f l i t e r a c y , b u t
51
t h i s l i s t i n g a l s o w o r k s t o o b s c u r e . I s i t t h e c a s e , f o r
e x a m p l e , t h a t l i t e r a c y w i t h i n t h e f a m i l y o p e r a t e s o n t h e
same grounds that it does in the church or on the job?
That it does is assumed rather than brought into question.
T h i s i s m a d e q u i t e c l e a r w h e n H u n t e r a n d Harm an s p e a k o f
the "unlettered" in foreign countries who
when given an opportunity to define their own
needs . . . are likely to stress first their
economic problems, followed by such personal
concerns as family living, child care, health,
and nutrition. (8)
T he a u t h o r s a d d , "What b e a r i n g , i f a n y , d o e s t h i s h a v e o n
adult life in the United States" (8)?
What bearing indeed unless the needs of literacy are
also the needs of economic survival. The categorial move
to separate needs from each other— from money, from
"personal" habits, from "community" life— is just another
symptom of the rigid separation of the idea of literacy
from the dictates of its use. Hunter and Harman's
separation possesses its cognitive dimensions, also.
Illiterates, for example, divide into subgroups who differ
not only in ethnicity and race and culture and wellbeing
but "they differ in their present levels of knowledge, how
they process information, their motives for learning, their
consciousness of community identity, and how they interact
with the larger surrounding society (104; emphasis added).
One wonders if the peculiarities of sub-group cognicity
will ever test favorably on traditional social
52
measurements.
The conclusion of Hunter and Harman's report on
illiteracy thus presents a frustrating situation. The
authors could hardly be more forthright: "We support
programs that increase the skills of community members to
interact with and change the mainstream culture and its
institutions" (105). But while they endorse empowerment
and change, they contain them within the society that
secures the opposite. One wonders, in other words, about
the will or abilities of social agencies such as the Ford
Foundation, which supported Hunter and Harman's work, to
ally with illiterate subgroups to change "mainstream
culture." Mainstream culture secures the studies that it
begets.
T he s t u d y o f t h e V a i a n d t h e s t u d y o f i l l i t e r a t e s i n
A m e r i c a e l a b o r a t e o n e a n o t h e r . From t h e m o r e a b s t r a c t
r e a l m s o f W e s t e r n i d e o l o g y b r o u g h t t o b e a r o n u n d e v e l o p e d
e c o n o m i e s , t h e w o r k i n g o u t o f t h e f o r m s a n d c o n t e n t o f
i d e o l o g i c a l p r e s u p p o s i t i o n s w i t h i n t h e l i v e s o f r e a l
W e s t e r n e r s t a k e s o n f a m i l i a r a p p e a r a n c e s . S c r i b n e r and
C o l e j u s t b a r e l y s u g g e s t a r a d i c a l d e v a l u a t i o n o f l i t e r a c y ;
t h e i r f a i l u r e t o f o l l o w t h e i r own a r g u m e n t t o i t s
c o n c l u s i o n s m i r r o r s t h e A m e r i c a n p r a c t i c e o f m i s s i o n
l i t e r a c y a n d t h e f a i t h t h a t t h e r e s i m p l y m u s t b e s o m e g o o d
t h a t c o m e s f r o m w h a t we a l l know t o b e g o o d .
T he u n w i l l i n g n e s s t o e i t h e r r e l i n q u i s h o r e x p a n d
53
notions of literacy is riveted in American economic and
educational structures. At the same time, the current
interest in literacy departs from a fund of traditional and
non-traditional sources. Few of the present advocates,
however, escape the silent mandate to keep the status quo
where it is. The first advocacy group is the most
traditional, its interests most vested and, up until now,
most protected. This is the group of English teachers and
the teachers of English teachers. The question of their
ideological co-option is so apparent as to be self-
explanatory, but this group is powerful and prolific, and
so its work needs examination for what it is.
The second group, and "group" in this case is a loose
term, consists of researchers who come from the domains of
Scribner and Cole and allied social science disciplines;
these are field psychologists, sociologists, socio
linguists who take their methodological cue from social
anthropology. The current popularity and increasing power
of this group deserves close attention. The tendency of
the social scientist to institute wholesale empirical
epistemologies as to the nature and validity of
"observation" as well as to attitudinize rather than
scrutinize the processes they advocate is especially
thorny.
The third group is the smallest and espouses the only
critique of the literacy flurry. In America, Henry Giroux
54
is the most prolific writer out of this perspective though
he is joined by people like James Sledd and Linda Finlay
who write less than they practice their beliefs. There is
a much larger group of British theorists who deal
specifically with issues of literacy; they are Peter Medway
and Michael Torbe, Harold Rosen, Margaret Meek, Britton and
Martin, and, most recently, Brian Street. The American
inability to escape certain imbedded traditions of literacy
is highly instructive as to the difficulty American
education faces.
In the first group, there are numerous examples of the
entrenched response to the need to research and to
understand literacy. A description of these efforts might
be most kindly termed provincial. A recent collection of
essays published by the Modern Language Association is
typical. Despite its contemporariness, Literacy For Life,
1983, edited by Bailey and Fosheim, is a genuine source of
traditional views. For example, in it Edwin J. Delattre in
an essay titled "The Insiders" differentiates between the
insiders, American literates, and the outsiders, American
illiterates. It has come to Delattre's attention that
many outsiders do not even know they are
outsiders; they think the world is for everyone
as it is for them. The challenge for teachers .
. . is to draw outsiders far enough inside to
detect the difference. Learners must have the
chance to know with brilliant clarity what it
feels like to be outsiders and to know they are
outside. (53)
55
T h e f a i l u r e o f D e l a t t r e t o q u e s t i o n t h e c o n t e n t o f t h e
i n s i d e i s r i v a l e d o n l y b y h i s b e l i e f t h a t s t u d e n t s w ho f a i l
to become acceptably literate have no idea as to the
benefits or constraints of literacy or to the motives of
those who would keep students illiterate. Delattre is not
singular, however. The idea of welcome is widespread;
advertising and extending invitations into literacy clubs
and communities range across the language/humanities
disciplines from developmental specialities (Smith, Essays)
to the domains of post-modernist literary criticism (Fish).
However, the philosophical tenor of modern English
literature and English education scholars is less
concentrated on broad statements of generosity as it is
fragmented into lists of questions addressed to specifics.
Literacy is not merely a separate issue but a startling
one. "What is literacy, anyway?" asks the author of the
introduction to Literacy for Life (Robinson, "The Users"
9). Following this is a series of questions such as, "What
are the needs of literacy in our time?" and "What are the
salient characteristics of our students as we assess their
potential for achieving literacy?" (6) These questions,
which for all their Aristotelianism concentrate on the
assessment issue, are notable for several reasons, but
their persistence in separating literacy from other issues,
as well as separating literates from each other, is
characteristic.
56
The model is also exemplified in 1978 in a
"Perspectives on Literacy" conference at the University of
Minnesota School of Education. This conference proposed to
study four topics:
(a) defining literacy and assessing literacy
(b) language perspectivess on literacy,
including linguistic development and
socio-cultural perspectives
(c) theory and research on the writing process
and writing instruction
(d) and theory and research on the reading
process. (Beach, 21)
N i n e t e e n e i g h t y - s i x b r i n g s f e w new q u e s t i o n s . A r e v i e w i n
College English of four recent books concerning literacy
asks if literacy is
to be defined in terms of its potential or its
actual practice [echoes of Scribner and Cole].
Can the results of becoming literate be
distinguished from the prerequisites for becoming
literate? Do cultures, subcultures, even
individuals differ merely in the uses they make
of reading and writing, or must we more
accurately say that they develop different
literacies. . . . (Brandt 129)
The confusion of the thing literacy with the effect of
l i t e r a c y i s a p p a r e n t . Y e t t h e l a y i n g o u t o f q u e s t i o n s
appears to clarify little while it delays action.
Two reasons for the tactics emerge. First, the
profession which asks the questions is itself confused.
57
English educators have long enjoyed their status partly
because of the inexpressibility of what they do. As
Delattre indicates, literacy is considered an inside
phenomena. Second, the profession has an interest in
believing in the enigmatic power of the literate artifact.
A sort of homage to the solid demonstration of literacy—
the script, the printed page, the preserved manuscript, the
student's five-paragraph essay— results. Literacy
possesses and confers powers that reside in and are
inseparable from literacy items. John Bormuth, a reading
specialist, supplies an unintentional description of this
quasi-mysticism. "In what meaningful sense," he asks,
"could we say, for example, that a highly skilled reader
enjoys literacy when in fact he lives on a desert island
and has nothing to read" (66)? To explore this concept of
literacy is to demystify a myth.
A second essay from Literacy for Life, "The Politics
of Literacy," by Sarah Goddard Power attests ably to the
grander aspects of literacy per se. Literacy, according to
Power, confers three things:
— As individuals gain reading skills they
extend the scope of their experience through
print media. Messages in the print media
tend to promote change.
— Literacy permits individual receivers, rather
58
than senders, to control the rates at which
messages are received, stored, and interpreted
— Literacy unlocks more complex mental
abilities. Whereas the illiterate individual
is largely dependent on memory, the literate
individual is able to manipulate symbols. (28)
Aside from the fact that all of these assertions are wrong,
as Scribner and Cole have shown in spite of their
difficulties, they evidence an appeal to literacy that
hardly stops short of supplication. This mentality, no
doubt, figures into Power's final lament apropos of the
uncivility of illiteracy. As she says, "the devastating
truth about literacy [is that] regardless of the nature of
the society, an illiterate cannot function successfully
within it" (22). Power unfortunately seems to lack a
sufficient knowledge of many societies and has little
appreciation of the difference money, say, can make in the
life of the marginalized illiterate. Nevertheless, Power
speaks from tradition. The oft-cited and often eloquent
work of Goody and Watt, for example, stresses a similar
ability of alphabetic, linear literacy to confer civilizing
democracy and to lubricate the ascendance of man from the
primitive to the modern state.
Thus, Power's point is not to be dismissed entirely; j
she undoubtedly speaks for many of the non-poor and non
illiterate in the society. No one would argue, either,
I
59
that illiteracy in a highly technologized society is
irrelevant to the situation of the illiterate. On the
contrary, the argument is that a highly literate society
which withholds literacy from some of its members uses
literacy as another form of exploitation. The
exploitation, however, does not come about because of
magical qualities of literacy to transport, or fail to
transport, an individual or community from marginalization
to decent conditions of lives and opportunities.
In 1970 in his book Crisis in the Classroom, Charles
Silberman attributes the overall demise in education to the
"mindlessness" of teachers (81). Silberman is not even
being critical. Today, the crisis in literacy education
could be attributed to "minding" the lessons of more and
diverse teachers and researchers of the subject. The
second group of academics concerned with literacy certainly
attains a high profile built on unorthodox views of what
literacy is and on who inherits the right to question long
standing traditions.
The form of much of this researech is ethnography, and
it is to this form that a good part of the current analysis
now turns. Ethnography comes from anthropology (at least a
branch of anthropology) and involves the first hand
collection and evaluation of data by observers. A recent
title in a social work publication suggests that all might
not be well with the method, however. "Blitzkrieg
60
i
Ethnography" warns of the dangers of placing the observer
on-a pedestal (Rist; see also Kantor et al.). Indeed, one
of the great difficulties of discussing the claims of
ethnographic research is the research method itself. We
might proceed with care, then, to make clear distinctions
between the practice of ethnography and the possibilities
it suggests. Some ethnographies are better than others; to
understand why requires a general assessment of the motives
for ethnographic research.
Aside from Scribner and Cole’s use of ethnography,
perhaps the most forceful argument for its use comes from
the work of Shirley Brice Heath. Heath has written in
Ways with Words an extraordinary story that traces the
language patterns of communities. Her milieu is a small
southern town which she studied for ten years. Three
communities within the town attract her interest: poor
black, mill, and mainstream groups. Based on lengthy and
persistent observation, Heath is able to show the powerful
strategies of community language. She makes the case that
certain ways with language are esteemed within certain
communities. Many of these ways, however, constitute
barriers to full participation in the mainstream (dominant)
society for people who do not speak or write the mainstream
language.
Heath shows that systematic patterns of language from
childhood through adulthood emerge along clear, often
61
chilling, lines. She says in the epilogue to her book:
Long before reaching school, children of the
townspeople [the mainstream community] have made
the transition from the home to the larger
societal institutions which share the values,
skills, and knowledge bases of the school. Their
eventual positions of power in the school and the
workplace are foredestined in the conceptual
structures which they have learned at home and
which are reinforced in school and numerous other
associations. (368)
These transitions, Heath argues, are paved with language.
So, she asks of her non-mainstream constituency:
Will the road ahead be altered for the students
[of black and mill families] who have, through
the efforts of some of their teachers, learned to
add to their ways of using a language at home?
Will their school acquired habits of talking
about ways of knowing, reporting on uses of
language, and reading and writing for a variety
of functions and audiences be transmitted to
their children? (362)
Heath’s answer is more pessimistic than not. She believes
that changes will be long in coming and will require
changes in both schools and jobs. She cites particularly
the kinds of jobs that render employees "unable to make
changes in the procedures for accomplishing a task, and
often not privileged to know the outcome of a project . . .
(365). Schools, she says, will have to learn to integrate
many ways with language if schooling is to offer equal
education to students. All of these recommendations, Heath
believes, are validated by ethnographic observation.
Should non-mainstream students adopt "acquired habits"
of language to transform their usual linguistic styles and
62
to render their offspring more like townspeople? This is
the sort of question which provides entry into broader
evaluations of Heath's work. Like Scribner and Cole, Heath
demonstrates an integrity that separates her work from the
rest, but also like Scribner and Cole, Heath succumbs to
certain ideological, academically ratified imperatives that
enervate her conclusions. Scribner and Cole lose out to a
fixation on literacy; Heath loses out to a fixation on
language. It is worth a moment to explore how this
happens, since after Heath, as after Scribner and Cole, it
happens again and again.
Heath's argument goes somewhat like the following:
language is culture; culture is a matter of private,
idiosynchratic but imbedded practices and habits; the way
to change culture is to change language; mainstream culture
is the most productive. Within this framework, ideas about
society slide into cultural domains because language is so
recalcitrant. Yet our duty is to transform recalcitrance
into acceptability, to facilitate conformity. To put it
another way, if we teach students to communicate in
mainstream ways, then society will become more equal and
just.
This argument is often tacit in Heath's work; when it
surfaces it is accompanied by corroborative statements
about how language patterns are formed. On the one hand
Heath appears to find logic in the dominant ways with
63
words. She acknowledges, for example, that mainstream
parents bring up their children in "contexts that [reflect]
the systemic relationships between education and
production" (368). (Heath is not claiming a plot between
education and production, of course, but she certainly
suggests a rational connection.) On the other hand, she is
not as generous with non-mainstream families. Her
description of the non-mainstream linguistic habits
(inutile within the larger society) suggests a blind
entrapment in which non-mainstream families make
unrelenting choices to prolong disestablishment. A rather
lengthy but telling quotation captures this. Heath
predicts the future of nonmainstream students:
The young couples of [the black and mill
communities], as they build their families, will
move away from some of their parents' habits and
ties to the past. But because the home patterns
of language use are inextricably linked to other
cultural features, a change in those language
uses which so powerfully determine a child's
success in school and future vocational
orientation will come very slowly, and only in
concert with numerous other types of change. The
ways with words, transmitted across generations,
and covertly imbedded and intertwined with other
cultural patterns, will not change rapidly. Many
of these ways with words will continue to be in
accord with and to reinforce other cultural
patterns, such as space and time orderings,
problem-solving techniques, group loyalties, and
preferred patterns of recreation. . . . The deep
and wide-reaching complexities of language, time
and space are more resistant to change than are
single-factor activities. . . . It is through
these ways of living, believing and valuing that
the descendants [of non-mainstream families] will
unconsciously pass on their knowledge and skills
in the symbolic manipulation of language. (366-
64
367)
Of interest here is not merely Heath's mixing of
levels of cultural activities but of her idea of what a
cultural activity is. The predominance given the notion of
space-and-time orderings presumes some basic characteristic
of cultural (if not universal) identity. Such a
presumption is hardly on a par with ideas about group
loyalty expressed in language habits. Heath's definition
of "culture," in other words, stretches the logical
imagination. How do "problem-solving techniques" or
"space-and-time orderings" participate in cultural
determination, determination that in the last instance
results in chronic, underfed disfranchisement for large,
identifiable groups of people? Will different time and
space orderings, rendered by changes in linguistic habits,
bring opportunity and justice into apparently disordered
lives? Heath is ambivalent. On the one hand she believes
that non-mainstream folks will have to practice mainstream
habits repeatedly:
Maintenance of. . . [newly acquired mainstream]
habits depends on both sustained motivation for
entrance into some vocation in which they are
seen as relevant, and exposure . . . to multiple
situations in which the habits can be repeatedly
practiced. (362)
The implication is that mainstreamers are made not born.
On the other hand, she knows that cultural habits do not
die easily; "parents [in non-mainstream communities] will
65
initiate changes in their cultures only when they see it as
their responsibility to provide opportunities for their
children to practice or extend what the school teaches"
(363-4).
So, it is the responsibility of parents to recognize
the counter-productiveness of their cultural habits,
whatever they may be. It is also their responsibility to
encourage the formation of new, school-practiced habits.
Herein lies a direct contradiction, however. New school
habits of literacy (and other culture-linked conventions)
are new only for the outside community. Could we not ask
if the attempt to habituate non-mainstream children to
alien systems of culture might ensure the maintenance of
the existing social order? Can one break into justice by
acquiring the habits that have promoted injustice? And how
did these habits on either side of the economic line arise-
-luck? These are the issues.
Instead of emerging from ten years of observation of
chronic disparity and bias to call for a change in the
society that perpetuates it, Heath has called for a
despairing people to change their language ways. Heath
does not intend changes in our society which might
alleviate economic demarcation among linguistic habits.
She preserves the role of language and encourages speakers
to adapt to it.
There is a certain apprehension of finding fault with
66
researchers like Heath and Scribner and Cole because, in
spite of difficulties, much of what they do focuses our
attention on what is to be done. Heath, in particular,
since Ways with Words has written and spoken of a number of
literacy programs with which she has been connected that
promise change and deliver it. Yet change circumscribed by
quotidien goals brings its own problems. A recent
observation made by Frank Smith, a long time defender of
the accessibility of literacy, almost chills. Smith, at
the end of a literacy conference, which he organized and
convened, finds himself compelled to doubt his commitment
to the ideals of reading and writing:
I can no longer regard the benefit of
[literacy's] acquisition as axiomatic. Rather,
the proposition that literacy is desirable and
worth the effort of learning has to be argued and
defended— especially, perhaps, with the children
we so ego-centrically expect to follow our
example (or our precept) of literate skills and
interests. (Awakening to Literacy v)
One of Smith's primary messages has been that teachers make
literacy difficult. Yet now it is the ego-centrism of
literacy that bothers him. Perhaps he has been trying to
avail literate opportunities to the wrong people; perhaps
the intrinsic good of literacy does not match the intrinsic
good of the people who cannot, or will not, learn to read
and write. Perhaps he has been availing to the right
people the wrong thing; as he says, some "children who
receive [successful] formal instruction in reading and
67
writing do not necessarily become literate ..."
(Awakening vi).
Does Smith mean that even people who acquire literacy
skills do not need it to acquire literacy's mandate?
Perhaps Smith has been working to no good end in the
wrong society. This is one way to read his self-doubt.
Self-doubt is rare in the literate professions, however,
and this is why it is important to study the newest
research that stimulates it. Smith is prompted to reassess
his commitments on the basis of ethnographic findings.
Long aware that cognitive psychology has prevailed in
educational issues, Smith appears ready for a fresh
perspective. Ethnography inspires a number of academics,
in fact. An article in late 1981 in Research in Teaching
English comments on the emergence of the method:
Whether you align yourself with the cynics who
view the current popularity of ethnographic
studies as one more passing research fad or with
the ethnographic evangelists who see field
investigations as the panacea for all educational
problems, you certainly cannot ignore its growing
impact or research in English Education.
(Kantor, et al. 293)
The authors decide to applaud the new direction: ;
This issue of Research in Teaching English
acknowledges the emerging importance of ethno
graphic studies in English education and examines
the methodology, suggesting reasons why it may be
the design of choice for many language,
composition, literature and reading studies,
particularly those which question basic
assumptions about the growth of writing and
reading abilities in the classroom. (293)
68
The authors may be premature in their optimism, however.
The freshness of the ethnographic perspective unfortunately
may excuse its incompleteness and sidestep an important
issue: how ethnographic research presumes to contribute to
an understanding of literacy. What, we may ask bluntly, do
ethnographers of literacy want? The answer is neither
clear nor original. The newest research appears to both
recapitulate the errors of Scribner and Cole and Heath, and
to sanction them. New ethnographies recast old ideologies:
ethnographic studies affirm that literacy is the entry as
well as the invitation to mainstream life.
A representative example of this is found in the
leadoff article in the 1985 collection of essays Awakening
to Literacy, a collection which includes Heath and a number
of others in the forefront of ethnographic studies. This
volume exemplifies certain ethnographic designs and, as in
the lead essay, both recommends and proceeds on their
bases. It sets the tenor for ethnographic research which
is echoed not only within the literary collection but into
the future, as well.
The essay is titled "Learning to Read Culturally:
Literacy Before Schooling." The authors, Bambi B.
Schieffelin and Marilyn Cochran-Smith, undertake the essay
to fill a void in the literature, to explore "literacy as a
social and cultural phenomenon . . . that exists between
people and . . . that connects individuals to a range of
69
experiences and to different points of time" (4). The
connections which interest Schiefflein and Cochran-Smith
are those which occur outside of "formal instruction."
Formal instruction basically means school, though school is
a hazy idea; kindergarten provides one of the contexts
studied as, presumably, informal while the second grade in
a public school is another— informal in the sense that the
family of the second-grade student does not go to school.
T he S c h i e f f e l i n / C o c h r a n - S m i t h s t u d y c a n b e s t b e
a n a l y z e d i n t h r e e p a r t s . We c a n l o o k a t i t s s h a p e a n d
d e s i g n ; w e c a n o b s e r v e t h e c o n t r a d i c t i o n s o f o b s e r v a t i o n s ;
a n d we c a n u n d e r s t a n d t h e r u e f u l n e s s o f t h e c o n c l u s i o n s ,
r u e f u l f o r u s b u t n o t f o r t h e e t h n o g r a p h e r s . By t h e e n d o f
t h e d i s c u s s i o n we s h o u l d b e a b l e t o c o m p r e h e n d t h e e f f e c t s
o f d i s o r d e r t h a t u n d e r l i e t h e s t u d y a n d r a t i f y i t s
c o l l a p s e .
The design of the project is startling. In its
broadest outline it conjoins three educational groups:
American pre-schoolers, a New-Guinean mother and her young
daughter (pre-school in a largely non-schooled society),
and a Vietnamese refugee family whose son attends the
second grade. The pre-school kindergarteners come from
Philadelphian families whose children, ages 3-5, attend
nursery school in the area in which they live. The New
Guinea family belongs to the Kaluli tribe in the Papuan
province, and the Vietnamese family resides in west
70
Philadelphia. The connection between these groups is
difficult to ascertain. Ostensibly, pre-literacy, or lack
of formal training in literacy, stabilizes their
relationships. The kindergarteners have never been taught
to read programmatically; the Papuan mother has attended
missionary school but passes on her literacy to her child
during daily, non-formal routines; and the Vietnamese
family consists of "pre-literate" adults, i.e., second-
language adults who are not literate in English, and a pre
bilingual child who learns English literacy at school but
who "informally" teaches English at home.
The "before-schooling" link among these groups appears
tenuous at best. A more logical assumption is that the
connections are provided by the ethnographers, themselves.
It is the ethnographers who live or who spent time in
Philadelphia and the Papuan province, and it is they who
have superimposed the idea of pre-school on these various
groups. Ideas of pre-school, pre-literate, and formal
programs are thus conveniences as much as realities. They
are pressed into service without regard to the differences
between literacy education not merely among countries but
within political exigencies. We never know if the
Vietnamese family went to school or not in Vietnam.
An equally puzzling facet of the study's design is the
reference to the social class of the members of the
communities. Class appears to play a large role for the
71
ethnographers. They make much of their own middle class
status as they prepare to avoid middle class biases, yet
they give no indication about what those biases might be.
In fact, the profession of middle class status amounts to
an extrication from its confines. (We might recall the
disintegration of class taxonomy in the Lynd and Warner
studies.) Class, for the ethnographers, appears to be any
feature popular in the repertoire of American denial of
class. For example, the kindergarteners are said to
represent the middle class; this means that the parents
have "strikingly similar educational backgrounds" and many
of the mothers teach school (5). At the same time, these
kindergartner families possess diverse heritages; the
families are white Eastern and Western European, Jewish,
Indian, Filipino, Egyptian, English and Black American"
(5). In addition, some of the children in the middle class
are bi-lingual or mono-lingual in a non-English language.
Even within the collective ken of token American classism,
these features stretch many boundaries. The in-country
class of the non-American families, the Papuans or the
Vietnamese, is never mentioned.
The mention of class only becomes understandable when
one realizes that class is already assumed to be a function
of literacy. Indeed, what really defines the class of
these divergent groups is their literate experience. The
members of the middle class "expect" their children to
72
become literate whereas this expectation is more abstruse
in other contexts. Surely, in this respect, the
ethnographers are on to something, but the something is
exactly what the ethnographers must set out to discover,
not take for granted. As the ethnographers haggle over the
irrelevancies of class identification, their own biases
emerge.
For example, within the general design of the study,
an odd but ubiquitous feature is an inconsistent
relationship between the observers and those observed. No
member of the American middle-class group, for example, is
referred to by name; the references are always plural. The
Kaluli family, however, is referred to specifically by
name, first name, in fact. The Vietnamese child (and
family) is referred to by an initial, as is his teacher,
Miss K. The child, furthermore, is said to live in the
lower class section of town where he goes to school with
other refugees like himself plus students who are "black,
Indian, Haitian, Ethiopian, and white," (16) but certainly
not middle class. The labeling may seem a piddling matter,
but, in fact, is part and parcel of the larger failure to
understand the bases of class or the empirical ground rules
on which class research goes forward. The odd labeling,
arguably, evidences internalisation of notions of class.
Reference to engagement with each group is also
peculiar. The different studies are validated according to
73
the length of time they are studied. The kindergarteners
were studied for 18 months. The Kaluli were observed as
part of a larger study, but the literacy information comes
from "83 hours of transcribed and annotated conversations"
and "extensive interviews and observations" (23). The
Vietnamese work is not put in a time frame though it is
apparent that the child is observed at school and is
accompanied home by the ethnographer on several occasions.
Undoubtedly, accounting for time, transcription, and paper
collection are habits of ethnographic process. On the
other hand, within the assumption of ethnography that
knowledge is contextual and understood as a matter of value
rather than account, the enumeration of hours and calendars
is discomforting. Furthermore, when the ethnographers set
out to view literacy in "relevant contexts," these contexts
become the hours; the relevance of context never gets a
hearing.
This is the sort of problem that underlies the design
difficulties. Ethnocentrism, here as in other studies,
effaces ethnographic questions about the content of a
literacy event. Literacy, indeed, is defined prior to
context and transported from scene to scene like a
suitcase; once in place, the notetaking begins. "Literacy
events" are events in which literacy exists.
So, one asks, what is literacy? In this study,
literacy is described as a "cultural phenomenon that
74
interacts with certain sociological processes" (4). What
is the phenomenon? The phenomenon, unsurprisingly, is
print. Literacy is a litany of print: "books and
literacy-related activities," (3) "texts and other printed
materials," (6) "books and book-related items," (6) "name
labels . . . books and other printed materials . . .
printed stories . . . the fictional narratives of
storybooks and . . . [the] print of posters, signs and
labels," (7) "simple booklets with line drawings," (11)
"each black and white page," (13) "books and magazines,"
(19) "print" (21). These events generalize to New Guinea
as well as to the Philadelphia refugee household. Literacy
is the object in the environment that connects all
environments; it is co-terminous in all aspects of display
and resource; it may be published by American corporate
textbook makers of children's stories; produced by students
of ages three or nine, Egyptian or Vietnamese; written and
distributed by missionaries, found on walls or within
bindings. Literacy exists as extension; content is not a
question.
Practice or use, of course, is the auspice which
explains the appearance of the artifact, the event that
demands the literacy. What happens in ethnography,
however, is that practice never gets a hearing, either.
Practice is a formality. The ethnographers observe in the
kindergarten, for example, literacy events without content:
75
There was no incongruity between a nursery school
philosophy that de-emphasized early reading and
writing and a pervasion of printed materials and
print-related activities in the nursery school
setting itself. There was no incongruity because
the context of nursery school literacy events
almost never was instruction or situations
wherein adults attempted to teach children to
read or write. Rather, literacy events
consistently were embedded within the routine
interactions of adults and children. For
participants, the literacy events themselves were
not noteworthy. (7)
The event, in other words, acquires its own autonomy,
separate from content and historical context.
On this issue, Scribner and Cole claimed ignorance of
historical theory to account for practices they could not
understand. Schieffelin and Cochran-Smith, however, claim
everything as an explanation. The relativity of practice
and the parity of literacy events means that literacy can
have any use. They give numerous examples. The middle-
class uses run the relative gamut:
Families used printing and found print to be
appropriate in a large number of contexts. In
this community, unlike other social groups, there
was no single context in which literacy could
occur and no single purpose to which it could be
put. (6) t
Such are the universal virtues of literacy, to serve
meaning in all "contexts and for many purposes in . . .
everyday lives" (8). Even small children use literacy
according to their "own social purposes . . . to
effectively fulfill their own needs" (9). This is not to
propose indifference to childhood needs; yet lost within
76
the generality of needs is their history, gravity,
development, etc. Lost, too, are specific needs within a
concrete circumstance; the Vietnamese child, for example,
represses his needs by keeping them secret (17). Children,
adults, and all in between have needs or uses for literacy.
Some needs just appear to defy definition.
The problem gains significance when we take into
account the model of society operant in Western
ethnography. The most succinct way to put it is the
ethnographers' own; they are interested to discover the
meaning of "what literacy means to the individuals
involved" (4). Society, to these ethnographers, is
individuality multiplied; it is composed of autonomous
persons who determine their needs for literacy
independently. When individuals aggregate, culture adds
up; therefore, individual needs are cultural needs.
What Schieffelin and Cochran-Smith appear not to grasp
is that societies precede individuals. Indeed, even
ethnographers come from a culture, or a society, which
traps them when they do not ask what the society obtains
for them— no matter the wish to be autonomous. Schieffelin
and Cochran-Smith simply aver to rote explanations of
larger ideas of culture: "We suggest that a careful
examination of cross-cultural material may allow us to
reevaluate the way we have formulated prerequisites for the
achievement of literacy which have been based on the
______________________________________________________________77
experiences of a relatively small number of social groups"
(4). But what groups and why them? The narrowness of the
prevailing concept of literacy appears to these
ethnographers as unfortunate happenstance. They believe
sincerely, perhaps, that more knowledge of more literacies
will yield greater social (and economic?) tolerance. Why
this should be so, or how knowledge of uses of literacy
would change the methods of American education and/or
global commerce amounts to naive speculation. Indeed, in
this ethnography, the needs of literacy disengaged from the
most ingrained (thus the most tacit) Western uses— to
please and to educate— appear unfathomable or pathetic.
Three examples in the Schieffelin/Cochran-Smith ethnography
show this to be true.
The middle class needs appear most clear. Middle
class people expect certain effects of literacy to occur
naturally. Middle class parents teach their children to
ready storybooks as leisure entertainment and to problem-
solve, to introduce and verify "new" information, and, as
one middle class mother says, to validate knowledge of
"just about everything" (6). Literacy provides an outlet,
moreover, for childhood emotions; literacy allows middle
class children to "sort out and work through strong
feelings" (7).
The Kaluli family in New Guinea, however, appears to
use literacy for nothing. The inclusion of the Kaluli in
78
the essay itself requires a sympathetic ear; the Kaluli's
literacy before schooling appears to be literacy after
missionaries, which, in the usual sense, does not coincide.
The outlines of the Kaluli study are broader than literacy,
of course. Over a number of years, this pre-literate
society has been observed, ostensibly for its orality since
the ethnographers characterize the society "as an
egalitarian one in which face-to-face interactions
predominate" (11). The current ethnographers, however,
take particular interest in a pre-literate family, one of
whose members is a pre-literate daughter who appears to
solicit literate interaction with the mother. The daughter
is two years old. The upshot of the literacy events
between mother and daughter amounts to very little, in any
event. The ethnographers observe that "literacy activities
for the Kaluli are very suggestive, but they have little
connection to other aspects of social life. Looking at
books is seen as neither instructional not entertaining"
(14). The mother and daughter share a missionary Bible
pamphlet, for example, but the mother does not encourage
"her child to look at the book and she did not use any of
the attentionals (such as 'look!')” which, for the
ethnographers, constitutes an act of reading (being
literate) (13). Thus, the ethnographers agree with the
mother who says that "literacy is to no purpose" (15). The
mother, of course, is probably right, but only because she
79
has a different idea of purpose than those who observe her.
Indeed, there are Western purposes which literacy
propogates, and their impact is clear. According to the
ethnographers,
those villagers who were interested and
participated tin the literacy instruction at the
mission/government school] separated themselves
from those who continued to lead more traditional
lives. . . . [Moreover], anyone attending the
mission would have difficulty gardening and
performing other food-collecting activities, and
so other family members who did not participate
in literacy activities would have to provide food
for those who did become involved in literacy and
mission activities. This could present a problem
in a society where people are organized to supply
food for members of their households. (12)
Further, as if more evidence is needed of literacy's
impact, the ethnographers add, "Interest in literacy tended
to separate individuals from one another in fairly
significant ways and changed the usual patterns of
organizing social activities" (12). Yet literacy is to no
purpose.
The Vietnamese refugee setting provides the third
demonstration of the Western view to literacy; in some
ways, its view is the most internalised. In this
situation, the ethnographers come up explicitly against
their own ethnocentrism and disregard it. Aside from the
rather contrived circumstance of presuming the pre-literacy
of the non-English speaking parents, the discussion centers
mostly on the acquisition of literacy by the child. (One
of the difficulties of this section is determining whose
80
pre-literacy is at issue as well as who teaches whom in
formal-vs-informal locations.) Outside of the formal
school of the child, none of the usual definitions or
explanations of literacy hold. The literacy "eventness" of
the homelife is veritably nil:
The family owns a television, and on the weekend
often go to Chinatown to see Chinese movies
. . . . [T]here are no books on the night tables
or magazines on a rack . . . [and] there is no
television guide. (17)
At the same time, however-, the child is progressing well in
literacy at school and he seems not to notice the literacy
deprivation of his home life. The ethnographers conclude,
therefore, that
Even if [the family's] environment does not have
a variety of books and reading material for them
to explore and is not literate in some sense,
their ideology is. (21)
The admission is shattering. And completely ignored. In
its place stands the absence of a tv guide. Why, we have
to ask, would literates be presumed to have a tv guide?
On the basis of the three cases, the study concludes
only what it can. It has stripped literacy of content,
content of judgment, judgment of social and economic
consequence. To wit, literacy attains transparence:
The variation among the three groups we have
examined demonstrates that the concept of
literacy has many different meanings and has many
implications. Children and adults learn a number
of different kinds of literacy in different ways
and for different purposes. (21)
Literacy is different, and so is the world.
81
Perhaps the above sorts of research efforts would
not be as depressing if they did not eclipse the details of
social life which are otherwise painful and clear. There
is one occasion in the Schieffelin/Cochran-Sxnith study, for
example, when an extended piece of literacy is explored.
The Vietnamese child writes a story which the ethnographers
reproduce in his hand. Yet the ethnographers focus on the
form of the story to the exclusion of its message. They
comment on the significance of its "narrative mode"; they
note that the story's theme of literacy competence "is
unrepeated by the English speakers in the classroom" (19).
But the story consists of more than an ethnographer's
"theme” or a composition modality. The story is about a
wise man who gives a child (the writer) a magic book whose
words the child cannot read; when the child makes known his
desire to read, the magic book magically fulfills his wish,
and he reads (19). Other occasions of the ethnographers'
inattention to the refugee relationship to literacy are
also palpable. Whereas the ethnographers conclude that the
Vietnamese adults show no sign of ever developing an
"involvement in English literature for personal expression
or enjoyment," (21) they also note that the occasions for
English literacy are bureaucratic— the family must fill
out forms, from job applications to tax and hospital
forms. The child's contact with literacy at school is
such to cause him deep embarrassment when the
82
father misspells a word in a note to the teacher; one of
the child's classroom penchants is to point out misspelled
words to his classmates. Often, the child accompanies the
mother to complete errands or supply translations for the
"people whose homes she was cleaning" (17).
Kaluli observations possess similar implications but
are less elaborated. The Kaluli's literacy is not even
their own script (as it was with the Vai); literacy was
first introduced to the Kaluli tribe by "evangelical
missionaries" who syllabized the Kaluli language and made
it "hard to say" (12-14). The Kaluli children do not learn
much literacy in school in any case. This is hardly
surprising.
Because there is no place in a Western literacy scheme
to castigate the forms of Western literacy, the details of
lives dominated— or supported— by the West exist only as
background information. They are absorbed into the
dominant ideology at just the moment they exhibit or defy
the domination— at the literacy event. Thus, the
overwhelming importance of the nature, cause, and history
of the event is lost, and thus the irony of the authors'
final remarks:
What we wish to impress on the reader is the
importance of an ethnographic approach to
studying the complex relationships involved in
the acquisition and evolution of literacy.
Without serious consideration of what literacy
means and does not mean for those people who are
introduced to it, it will be impossible to make
83
sense of the ways literacy organizes and is
organized by different social groups. (22)
The ethnographic method, as evidenced by this study,
announces the inability to make sense out of literacy.
This assessment may be overstated, but not by much.
It is more than merely unkind to reduce non-Westerners to
aimless moviegoers or tribes to undistinguished
comprehenders. None of these studies— Scribner and Cole,
Heath, Schieffelin and Cochran-Smith— set out to do so; yet
each study delivers the practice of literacy into a blank
realm of infinite interpretation. Scribner and Cole point
to the socio-historical system for an understanding of the
consequences of literacy. Heath scales the meaning down to
a community level, the political value of literacy to the
mainstream population. And Schieffelin-Cochran-Smith
locate the meaning within the individual even as the
individual exists within a community within a class, within
a society, within a culture. Yet, whereas none of these
locations is wrong and all are material, the impetus for
each study has been to separate out literacy from its
environs for its presumed uniqueness. Thus, literacy has
attained a stature unto itself; it exists spatially,
technically, and neutrally, or it does not exist at all.
This is to say that the literacy flag signals itself first.
This confusion between the apparent concreteness of
the object and the groundlessness of its symbolicity
84
results in the helplessness of these ethnographic
conclusions. For the ethnographers, their task is done
when literacy is excised; when society gets in the way,
they say so and delegate the more difficult questions to
other disciplines (though in the meantime they simplify
society). That the ethnographic data often contains in it
the answers to the socio-economic nature of literacy but
that these are not seen is a function of the ideology that
oppresses both the researchers and their subjects. Even
attempts to critique the Western ideology of literacy
succumb to ideological traps. In Theory and Resistance in
Education; A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Henry Giroux
writes of the strange enervation of literacy in the current
American educational debate;
Literacy is an issue that in the current debate
regarding the role and purpose of schooling
appears to have 'escaped1 from the ideologies
that inform it. At first glance, there is a
curious paradox in the fact that while the
subject of literacy has once again become a major
educational issue, the discourse that dominates
the debate represents a conservative retreat from
dealing with the issue in a significant way— the
scope and widespread interest in literacy and
schooling has generally served to flatten the
debate rather than enhance it. With few
exceptions, the issue of literacy has been
removed from the broader social, historical, and
ideological forces that constitute its existence.
(205)
As we have seen, if Giroux is mostly correct, he is also
mostly alone. He may have more accurately characterized
the lapse in ideological awareness as an academic lapse,
85
for there are certain self-declared, commercially
successful, right-wing ideologues in the literacy movement
(Burton Yale Pines; John Simon); intellectual academics,
however, have been content to leave the popularization of
literacy to the populace or to the politically less
powerful echelons of university teaching staffs and
departments.
Giroux's assessment of the situation proves
particularly useful as an antidote to in-house
provincialism; more than this, Giroux is concerned to re
invest literacy with a political content and status. As he
says,
the ideology that informs conventional
conceptions of literacy has stripped it of its
function for critical reasons, as a mode of
thought and assemblage of skills that allow
individuals to break with the predefined. . . .
[Literacy] has been reduced to the alienating
rationality of the assembly line, a mastery
without benefit of comprehension or political
insight. (206)
Giroux is also aware that "literacy can be neither neutral
nor objective, and that for the most part . . . is
inscribed in the ideology and practice of domination"
(225).
Giroux's observations are in the main correct and
distinguish him from the many scholars who subscribe to a
definition of literacy in the usual manner. But, implicit
within Giroux's critique lies the usual definition itself.
When he speaks of "stripping" literacy, itself an
86
"assemblage of skills" whose self-possessed political
status is "inscribed in" ideology, he adheres to the vision
of a reified literacy. The difference with Giroux is that
the reification is at a higher level; instead of graffiti
and captions on poster paper, Giroux speaks of reading and
writing comprehension. To put it another way, for Giroux,
print does not dominate; comprehension of print does. To
comprehend, in Giroux's model, is to perceive ideas within
words (symbols). This is a difficult idea to disentangle,
and the problem leads Giroux to the second abyss of
previous researchers and that is the separation of literacy
from the social matrix that gives it meaning. Because
Giroux winds up in positions reminiscent of his foes, his
bind deserves close attention.
Giroux objectifies literacy in a curious way. He
splits the ideology of literacy into two camps. These are
the instrumental and interactionist views of literacy.
Their characters, respectively, carry the dual Western
mandates of literacy— to educate and to please.
The instrumental approach to understanding and
imparting literacy takes a positivist, conservative
position. It deals with literacy as a method to instill
knowledge. Giroux summarizes, "The major premises of
instrumental ideology are drawn from the logic and method
. . . of prediction, efficiency, and technical control
derived from eighteenth-century science" (210). The
87
knowledge to be dispensed is the best knowledge, of course
— good books— and the writing to be demonstrated is formal.
Good students possess exemplary abilities to exemplify.
The instrumental approach is top down and factory-like.
The interactionist approach assumes a romantic stance.
It is placid and individualistic; its ends presume peaceful
co-existence. There are two strands— cognitive and
emotional. According to Giroux,
both positions subscribe to a truncated notion of
power and praxis. In the cognitive developmental
model, power is reduced to a struggle or
interaction between 'man and the natural
world'. . . . In the romantic [emotional]
approach, power is reduced to the discourse of
psychological categories and ends up becoming
synonymous with concepts such as 'self-
fulfillment,' 'becoming,' and 'self-
actualization.' (219)
It becomes clear pretty quickly that the need to split
literacy into alternate functions is unnecessary, however.
At the same time, the division indicates Giroux's
assumptions about the autonomy of literacy. In both
instrumental and interactionist approaches, literacy is
held to possess intrinsic rather than allusive properties.
Giroux says,
The result is a view of literacy that celebrates
an abstract condition regarding language use
. . . [and] removes the notions of roles,
rationality, and culture, all of which deeply
structure the school experience, from the benefit
of sociological and historical analysis. (221)
The effects of both of the ideologies are the same. The
interactionist approach works
88
to divorce theory from practice and consciousness
from social action . . . reduc[ing] the
relationships between content and context either
to the imperatives of feeling good or to the
safety of the classroom debate. (220)
At the same time, the instrumental approach defines
knowledge as "objective, outside of the existence of the
knower, and subject to the demands of exact and precise
formulation" (210). Both approaches result in a dualism
between the world and the individual, neither being
penetrable.
Unfortunately, Giroux loses literacy to mystery and is
unable to posit literacy's relationship to the "mechanisms
of overt and hidden curriculums" in schools (214). He
leaves literacy to its own devices in order to get on with
what he thinks is more pressing business— the domination of
the schools. Yet, he cannot focus on the schools at the
expense of literacy, for the definition of literacy is not
merely a function of school but its foundation. Indeed,
literacy prefigures the schools; it comes first
synchronically if not through time.
In school, Giroux assumes that comprehension equals the
intake of information and ideology. This is how schools
turn out proper conformity and regulate failure. As a
piece of weaponry in the ideological arsenal, literacy
enforces acceptable ideas and behaviors: "In essence,
language practices represent one feature of the dominant
8 9
culture that schools legitimate in varying degrees" (214).
To a certain extent, Giroux is right. He is at least
right to pursue the location of meaning across the domain
of schooling. He is also right to point out that students
come to school with the "values, styles, taste, and culture
of the favored classes" already favored (214).
Nevertheless, he returns to a static notion of literacy,
or, to be more accurate, to a static comprehension of
literacy, to explain further school indoctrination.
Students begin to understand symbols and to symbolize
themselves and their positions within the society in terms
of the valorization of their language.
Mainstream literate students are rewarded for their
submission to certain literate habits. But students do not
submit to language. Literacy is not a blunt instrument of
domination. It is, as Giroux says, "a political phenomenon
. . . [that] represents an embattled epistemological
terrain on which different sociological groups struggle
over how reality is to be signified, reproduced and
resisted" (237). Fighting over sociological signification
is a linguistic fight inseparable from the politics of
schooling, however. Literacy, as Giroux mistakenly
assumes, is not a mirror of educational battles; it is the
battle.
One suspects that Giroux views the indoctrination of
literacy as something which happens only during an English
V
90
class. No doubt literacy's oppression may be realized
there, but it is not limited to spelling, grammar, and
vocabulary tests. The fact is that citizenship courses (a
special interest of Giroux), history, science, and other
subjects also demarcate students according to literate
achievement. Students who do not learn to read or write do
not learn history, science, or the intricacies of literate
citizenship. The question boils down to how the
preservation of canonical literacy for one group of
students works to their benefit while the vocationalization
of literacy for another works to their detriment.
Giroux, in his most recent book (with Stanley
Aronowitz), ends a discussion of literacy by asserting that
teaching literacy in schools is paramount. In his words,
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.
(Aronowitz and Giroux (132)
There is no argument with these assessments, but they will
not be activated by a reified literacy.
It may be asked of the present analysis if it is not
guilty itself of, at least, rarefying literacy. Have we
not effaced literacy, questioned its presence and purpose,
and attacked or discarded it? The answer is that until the
basis for our current approach to and understanding of
literacy is examined, our questions will generate the kinds
of nonanswers that we have seen and they will continue to
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block further understanding and action. They will lead to
the study of literacy, on the one hand, in the most
microscopic of ways, and, on the other, to the study of
purpose and practice in the most uninformed, ideologically
covert matter. These are precisely the directions of most
current literacy discussions. The erasibility of literacy
foregoes its pencilling in. One final example should serve
to illustrate.
In "The Ethnography of Literacy," an essay in Writing :
The Nature, Development, and Teaching of Written
Communication, volume 1, the author John F. Szwed latches
onto the dualities of literacy in the most ferocious way.
Apropos of the objective artifactuality of literacy, Zwed
expresses concern that we may not be paying enough
attention to print. He is concerned that we do not take
seriously matters of typography:
One small but important example is the current
debate over the widespread use of Helvetic type
(as used by Amtrak, Arco, Mobil and numerous
other business and governmental sign and logo
users). The issue turns on whether the type's
nature (presumably depersonalized, authoritative,
and straightforward) brings unfair and misleading
pressure to bear on its readers, as it appears to
be the face of the largest and most powerful
forces in America. (17)
Indeed, Zwed suspects, if typeface would swing a stick,
consumers had better look out. Alternately, Zwed
continues, "Why and under what circumstances is [sic]
reading and writing done?" (17) He answers:
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To consider the use of books, in addition to
providing information and pleasure— they are
bought as decorations, as status symbols, gifts,
investments, and for other reasons yet to be
discovered.
Similarly, virtually nothing is known about the
social contexts of reading and writing and how
these contexts affect these skills. A quick
beginning inventory of reading contexts would
include bedside reading, coffee-break and lunch
time reading, vacation reading, reading to
children, Sunday reading (perhaps the day of most
intense literary activity in the United States
and Europe), reading during illness, educational
reading (both in institutions and informally),
crisis reading (psychological, physical,
spiritual), sexual reading, reading to memorize,
commuter reading, reading to prevent interaction
with others, etc. In theory, at least, there is
a form of reading specific to every room: books
are sold for kitchens, coffee tables, desks,
bedrooms . . . or bathrooms. (17-18)
Zwed's idea of context and purpose is rather complete, one
might say, given that one lives in a nice Western house
with an eight-to-five job, psychological self-doubts, and
well-lit bathrooms. This is a world that exists, no doubt,
but it is a world of Western platitudes as well as a
demonstration of American academic arrogance.
To find oneself compelled to say this is less an
embarrassment than an imperative, however. Within the
confines of a critique on literacy research, one must
assert that the current modes will not do. To define
literacy and then proceed to look for it is not merely to
lose the possibility of discovery but to forget that those
possibilities exist. It is also to forget that research
itself exists within a set of academic, economic, and
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political relationships. Researchers are part of the world
they want to examine; at the same time, they set themselves
outside of and in superior relationship to selected bits of
the world, be they Vai society, ghetto Philadelphia, or
American schools. The researcher is the adjudicator, the
one which turns the other into an object. The researcher
must ask, therefore, why she or he is in a position to do
so and what may be the consequences of his or her actions.
In large measure, these are not questions that have
been asked in the research under review here. They are, of
course, the questions which must be asked. Their range is
broad, tortuous, and exciting. To begin where we are is to
ask first about the usefulness of recent research on
literacy which ends without ways to explain use as a fully
operative, integrated concept. Scribner and Cole, for
example, find not one but three literacies in a society,
each with a specified "use," but, more importantly, each
with a significance for the other. Yet most of their
research time was spent on distinguishing one literacy from
the other per discrete activity rather than trying to
understand the mesh of activities.
Harder questions than this arise, however. The first
that comes to mind is why study literacy at all? Why,
indeed, at this time has literacy become a central issue, a
"literacy crisis" its central feature?
Some responses, of course, prefer to dodge the issue
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by explaining that Americans can read and write, say, as
well or as badly as they ever could. But this answer
hardly relieves the need to ask or explains the claims for
a "crisis." What, we have to wonder, has allowed vast
relativities of literacy and unhinged criteria for uses?
Returning to our original observations about the social
base in chapter one, we might keep before us the fact that
the relationships among Americans are established along
economic lines. Would it not be logical then that literacy
conforms also to these lines? Illiterates work for
literates in the United States; undeveloped illiterate
countries do also. Is it the case that literacy is an
economy?
The answer is not quite; money and words are not the
same. The chief argument of the present analysis, however,
is that the basis of the economy is changing. Such is the
case with literacy— it is an unstable idea, despite our
efforts to stabilize it. The nature of the change concerns
the shift from industry to information. Given the purposes
of the proprietors of the shift, the position in which
businesses, corporations and governmental agencies find
themselves is very difficult. Words are neither machines
nor products in any usual sense. Yet the reaction to this
shift certainly finds part of its expression within the old
industrial model. And, since much of the information-based
demands of the current technology are more autonomic than
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creative, the adaptation works. Literacy can be
instrumentalized to a degree, just as people can be. The
growing problem is along the boundaries, for there the
conceptual difficulties arise: information relates; it
does not command.
The old world of literacy is in transition. The
Western ideology of American academics (and the British,
most visibly) no longer suffices; old-guard literates will
have to discover new ways to ratify their privileges, and
many will lose them. At the same time, as current trends
in labor attest, other groups used to privileges will also
have to change; they will be forced, at the least, to
realign. Such is what amounts to the breakdown between
white and blue collar distinctions. Literacy, thus, comes
to assume a credential status; on it will depend the
morbidity of entire groups of workers. As this occurs, the
credential itself will lose value as well as content. High
school diplomas will mean little; college diplomas will
mean little; both will be required. The point is, however,
that the credential, particularly the literacy presumed by
the credential, is not the cause of opportunity.
Opportunity is merely changing its face.
Are we to presume, then, that literacy education and
research can be understood to operate as an instrument of a
dominant, funded part of our society? Is there an evil
overlay to our current research activities? As vulgar as
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the question may be, it cannot be dismissed. The question
is vulgar because literacy is conceived vulgarly— as
something which contains its own rights and whose rights
can be co-opted. There is nothing overly complicated, in
other words, between the needs of a capital economy and the
purposes and practices in literacy education. Two examples
of their compatibility, if not the outright demand for
matching goals, suffice.
The first comes from Richard Lanham, a noted authority
on post-secondary literacy, who writes of the purposes of a
college composition curriculum. In the 1984 edition of the
Modern Language Association publication Profession, Lanham
calls on composition programs, essentially, to wake up to
their agendas:
Our present bemusement with technology has
blinded us to the more fundamental adjustment
universities must now make, a response to our
information society parallel to the nineteenth
century response to industrialism. I have not
been able to invent a stirring phrase for what is
needed, and the one I press into service—
humanistic engineering— is bound to vex
everybody. The thing needed, however, stands
clear enough, even if we haven't yet a proper
name for it— a curriculum that will focus on our
society's demand for ever greater and more
complex kinds of verbal symbolization. I have no
objection to calling this area simply 'rhetoric,'
if that is not too dirty a word for you. That a
service oriented information society will need a
substantial and fundamental education in rhetoric
seems beyond question. This broad and
unstoppable historical requirement creates the
large force, the plate tectonic, of which the
literacy crisis, the back-to-basics movements in
the schools, and the confusion and disarray of
the humanistic curriculum are the most visible
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symptoms. (12)
Lanham's collusion with capital speaks for itself.
"Unstoppable historical" forces are tough competitors, like
hurricanes, perhaps. Only when we ask how societies in
fact, stop or begin do we enter a realm in which rhetoric
is not only not dirty but plain.
Lanham, of course, is neither alone in his assessments
of the society which has employed him to run a writing
program nor in his unwillingness to re-route change. There
is an opposite end to Lanham's argument which is equally as
disturbing, however. Instead of gearing up to meet
economic mandates, some foresee gearing down. In the jaws
of an information age, perhaps teachers should learn
retreat and teach it to their students. This kind of
defeatism echoes in an essay by Eleanor Duckworth, who
participated in a Harvard symposium concerning the demise
of education. She says,
Given the employment prospects, one might even
accept the responsibility to educate young people
to live productively while unemployed. This I
put forward not altogether in jest. [There are]
a number of nonacademic abilities quite as
demanding as the arts and sciences: how to
identify worthwhile and possible tasks; how to
participate in public decision making; how to
benefit from local facilities and amenities; how
to negotiate with resource holders. None of
these is a simple accomplishment. . . . All
would be valuable for employed people as well as
unemployed. All would contribute to a workable
society. (17)
All would contribute to maintaining the need to train
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students for unemployment, too, if undertaken in the
present economic environment. To be sure, Duckworth
recalls the vicious realities which not only affect numbers
of people in this society but which always have. The
separation of educational matters— arts and
sciences— from matters of society, however, is the reason,
not the cure, for the debilitation of many of society's
citizens.
Of course, there are those like Christopher Jenks,
who, after completing a massive study On Inequality in
American schools, concludes that nothing the schools do can
change childrens' prospects, and that the only successful
"campaign for reducing inequality probably requires that
the exploited must cease to accept their condition as
inevitable and just" while the rich, for their parts, "must
begin to feel ashamed of economic inequality" (265).
In the event that Jenck's proposals do not work out,
literacy educators and researchers have a choice to make.
Whereas there are no simple ratios between schooling,
literacy, and employment, one of the reasons is that
literacy is not an instrument of iterated meaning nor an
aesthetic symbol of social control. Literacy is part and
parcel a relationship which involves the vertical and
horizontal exchanges of the means of livelihood in a
literate society. Thus, it is the relationships of
literacy which a society bent on unequal distribution of
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wealth and power dominates completely that literacy
educators must understand in order to proceed in ways that
do not implicate them in the domination. Likewise, they
should recognize the pitfall of "neutrality" and
"objectivity," which may lead to bad faith.
William Labov, on April 12, 1985, in an interview on
National Public Radio, made two broad statements. First,
he said that his most recent research showed a further
distancing of ghettoized black language from white,
standard English. Second, he said that socio-linguists
such as he could not make judgments about the social
response to his findings. Labov said that he sees his job
as one in which to lay out the facts. That is true; it is
one of his jobs. But, he, as well as other literacy
scholars, undertakes a second job every time he chooses to
go into a ghetto to tape record and analyze the speech of
black people in the United States. This is a political
choice, not merely another choice. He cannot claim
impunity for consequences he allows by supposing that his
is the right to neutrality in a racist society.
The neutral stance of literacy educators and
researchers is the ideology that literacy research
perpetuates, the mask that allows masking to go on.
Neutrality is a claim about form, and the very simplest
fact about literacy is that it is always contextual. It is
always about something, a content, a subject. Content is
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the least acknowledged, least talked about, least valued
aspect of most of the current research on literacy.
Content has been reduced to form and form to relativity,
and this has allowed discourse about literacy to proceed
without regard to what people are saying. It substitutes
concern for material consequences with concern for
proprietary boundaries.
In this country, the shift from industry to
information takes precedence over the life of the person
who "handles" it. Within the Western tradition, as we have
seen, there is a belief that something about literacy
vehemently opposes the view of life as a commodity. This
belief has been useful in ensuring the pleasantness of some
lives, and it is not necessarily a wrong belief; at the
same time, it has pushed many into the margins. We may
want to believe that something about literacy resists
domination; what we have to believe is that literacy is an
idea our society has not yet finished with. A broader view
of literacy which sees it as contextualized, and sees
context as economic at heart, may constitute the
possibility for change as well as a means. The question is
how long the possibility can survive.
Anthony Wilden, Lewis Thomas, Gregory Bateson, Michel
Foucault, Theodor Adorno, Karl Kraus, Kenneth Burke and
others distinguish humankind from other kinds of life by
the ability of humans to make language. In System and
101
/
Structure/ Wilden summarizes:
What probably distinguishes human communication,
of which language is an integral part, from all
other levels of communications
. . . especially in the sense that it is far
removed or displaced from self-evident or
strictly biological survival value— is that the
primary goal of human communication appears to be
the invention of goals. (431)
This description is optimistic, idealistic, and ridden with
the reification just denounced. Language invents nothing
on its own. Yet Wilden and others recognize that many
goals in this society involve repression which masks as
opportunity. The anti-ideological task of those concerned
with literacy is to understand how literacy figures into
repression and how literacy can change goals. This is to
say that we must understand our world in order to do
something about our literacy, two tasks which proceed
simultaneously.
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III. A Theory of Literacy
As this study has tried to show, the current
understanding of literacy is ideological precisely when it
fails to disengage itself from the ends of Western,
capitalist domination. The consequences of this failure
are the exploitation of illiterates and the loss of
opportunities for wider access to knowledge, self- and
social consciousness, if not control. These consequences,
as Anthony Wilden would say, are a form of social violence.
It is, he says
a covert form which is perhaps most devastating
of all for those subject to it. [It] is the
passive violence of the refusal to recognize
overt or real violence. It may be expressed in
deeds; or in positions, stances, attitudes,
rules, codes, manners, in inertia, cynicism,
’scientific objectivity,' coyness, humor; in
refusal, disavowal, negation, or disconfirmation-
-but also and especially at all levels, in words.
(481)
Wilden does not narrow the field of words to literacy, but
the power of words is the power of literacy. Literacy is
not newly oppressive, but the forms of its violence may be.
Literacy is a social restriction and an individual
accomplishment. Individuals read and write, or don't, and
individuals do with their literacy what they can. The
subjectivities of minds and the ways in which people make
their lives and thoughts, and the ways in which people are
coerced, entrapped, colonised, or freed, must be addressed
as processes. At the same time, the processes must not
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become the issue, since the conditions for any process and
especially for the literacy process, determine the possible
outcomes. That is why, for example, teaching literacy
depends on the circumstances rather than the textbook. Our
attention needs to be focused on the conditions in every
instance.
A theory of literacy is, thus, a theory of society, of
social relationships, and the validity of a theory of
literacy derives from the actual lives of the people who
make the society. It is not the case that literacy
provides the key to understanding the connections of a
people; it is the case that literacy provides a view from
which to survey the history and future of social
formations. The theory in this study is that literacy is a
system of oppression which works against entire societies
as well as against certain groups within given populations
and against individual people. The third world is
oppressed by the system of literacy of the first world;
ghetto blacks are oppressed by the American system of
literacy education; and a second grade girl is oppressed by
a teacher who fails to understand the craziness of the
spelling of certain vocabulary words (Holt 76). Literacy
oppresses, and it is less important whether or not the
oppression is systematic and intentional, though often it
is both, than that it works against freedom. Thus, the
questions of literacy are questions of oppression; they are
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matters of enforcement, maintenance, acquiescence,
internalisation, revolution. Which is to say that when
societies dissolve the forms of oppression against their
own citizens and against other societies, then they will
dissolve the questions of literacy, also. Only when the
forms of oppression are undermined can the question of what
to do with one's life become central.
The engagement between society and individual, or the
subject, is what must be understood if literacy is to
contribute toward goals of betterment. Chaim Perelman in
The New Rhetoric, for example, speaks of a "community of
minds" which agrees to certain rules of argument and thus
functions on the basis of those agreements (55).
Communities of minds is an appealing, perhaps even
charming, notion; yet minds do not leave their- real
territories, and arguments between minds amount to
struggles between those who can win arguments and those who
cannot. To put it another way, in American society the
struggle is between those who can read and write and those
who cannot or have no opportunity to, and the struggle is
over who is entitled to have arguments. It is perfectly
evident who loses that right.
The way the current study must proceed, therefore, is
through an examination of the dialectic between individuals
and society as mediated by literacy. As we are concerned
with theory, moreover, the ideas of individuality and
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social relationships themselves come into question. Much
of the present argument, in fact, contends that current
distinctions between these two ideas are false. We can
attempt this task by considering the work of Paulo Freire,
whose own task has been to analyze these questions. Freire
is a person committed to broad conceptions of literacy. At
the same time, his commitment in unfinished, as he states,
and so provides a baseline for discussion and suggestions
for further work and insight.
Freire, we might observe from the outset, is not the
only baseline. Franz Fanon is another. In The Wretched of
the Earth, Fanon establishes an orientation toward the
issues of literacy without ever referring to the term
literacy. He writes not of the illiterate but of the
colonised, and he says plainly that the colonised no longer
exist as they once did, no longer exist alone, they exist
with the colonisers. Fanon"s temperament hides little; his
advocacy is vehement: "[F]or the colonised person, life
can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the
settler" (qtd. in Wilden 476). This companionship is a way
illiteracy might be understood and action construed.
Illiterates do not exist alone today; they exist with
literates and because of them.
Freire takes a different route. More than anything
else, Freire is a revolutionary, but within the world of
Brazilian and Chilean peasants he opts for knowledge over
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death, literacy over guns. As against Fanon, Freire posits
less violence. He says, for example, "It is as conscious
beings that men are not only ijn the world but with the
world, together with other men" (Politics of Education 68).
The reappropriation by the illiterate peasant of his own
power will occur in direct recognition, then confrontation,
with those who would take his life away. But Freire says
this will occur "by means of culture. Cultural action and
cultural revolution, at different stages, constitute the
modes of this expulsion" of domination (Politics of
Education 53). For Freire, becoming literate, in a
literate dominated society, is the first step to knowing
culture.
Although Freire has his critics, and even his friends
speak of the "Brazilian" character of Freire's academic
discourse (Giroux xviii), Freire's arguments for literacy
bring to light a myriad of theoretical and experiential
complications. Freire provides a way in. At the same
time, to anticipate the discussion a bit, he also provides
an example of theoretical confusion. From his earliest and
perhaps most well known book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(translated in 1968) to his most recent collection of
essays, Freire maintains his emphasis on the uneven
alignment between the constituencies of third world
literacy. In Pedagogy he speaks of oppressors and
invaders; the oppressed and the liberated. The oppressors
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he regards as subjects, the oppressed as objects. Indeed,
a sign of the oppressed person's move away from oppression
is an assumption of subjective status. Yet there is a
middle ground, as many former "objects" of oppression
themselves become "subject" oppressors. As Freire says in
Pedagogy, the oppressed desire to be men "but for them to
be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of
humanity" (30). An example is the phenomenon of peasant
overseers who tyrannize their compatriots.
One recognizes quickly that theoretical and practical
problems result from Freire's dichotomies; they hamper
Freire's ability to carry through his arguments for the
importance of literacy. Perhaps the best way to tackle
these problems is to explore first what Freire means by
literacy and then to go on to the issues of its
substantiation and transformation within the lives of
illiterates and illiterate societies.
For Freire, the exigence of literacy is knowledge;
literacy is knowledge-making. Freire says that as
illiterates become literate, they learn "to know in a
different way what they knew before, but they also begin to
know what before they did not know" (Politics of Education
162). Illiterates who become readers and writers become
readers and writers of themselves as part of the world in
which they live and as makers of the world and as victims
of it. The point of literacy "is not properly speaking to
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fabricate the liberating idea but to invite the people to
grasp with their minds the truth of their reality"
(Politics of Education 85). The truth of reality is often
hidden within literacy, and literacy itself is hidden by
the dominant classes who vest their interests in the
continued mystery of words unread. Freire is not so
foolish as to think that the truth and reality of existence
reside within words themselves (though this point will be
returned to later), but he speaks expressly of the process
of "mythicization" of reality that occurs to keep literacy
"opaque" and fragmented in the "innumerable alienating
words and phrases" (Politics of Education 49) that
characterize dominant education. The illiterates, at the
hands of protectors (often social workers, in Freire's
estimation), enjoy the status of marginal people. They are
separated from life and presumably are in need of
salvation. Like slum dwellers, they are "intrinsically
wicked and inferior" (Politics of Education 56). After
all, Freire says, "it would be extremely naive to expect
the dominant classes to develop a type of education that
would enable subordinate classes to perceive social
injustice critically (Politics of Education 102).
The alternative to the oppressive inculcation of literacy
is an interrogation of literacy. Freire calls such
interrogation the "problematization" of the word— when
literacy rather than the illiterate becomes the object of
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question. This is a primary difference between Freire's
educational philosophy and the dominant modes in Brazil and
elsewhere. Freire states, "To 'problematize' the words
. . . means to problematize the thematic element to which
it refers. This necessarily involves an analysis of
reality" (Politics of Education 23). The result is
"conscientization," the making sense of reality by piercing
the myth of the irrationality whose source of meaning is
the written word.
Within the linguistic ken of Portuguese, the concept
of "conscientization" takes on a particularly concrete form
since the syllabic nature of the language is additive while
comprehension of meaning, as in all languages, is
generat ive:
That is why when [the peasants] participate
critically in analyzing the first generative
words linked with the existential experience,
when they focus on the syllabic families that
result from that analysis, when they perceive the
mechanism of the syllabic combinations of their
language, the learners finally discover, in the
various possibilities of combination, their own
words. Little by little, as these possibilities
multiply, the learners, through mastery of new
generative words, expand both their vocabulary
and their capacity for expression by the
development of their creative imagination.
(Politics of Education 59)
Literacy, in other words, loses its opacity.
Conscientization, therefore, is empowerment, and the
force of its enlightenment is extensive. A Chilean peasant
says :
110
You can't imagine what it was like to go to
Santiago to buy parts. I couldn't get oriented.
I was afraid of everything— afraid of the big
city, of buying the wrong thing, of being
cheated. Now it's all different. (Politics of
Education 60)
Enlightenment, however, is not magical; to the contrary,
enlightenment requires a constant, unending struggle, which
Freire recognizes involves the struggle against the
internalisation of dominant values— once certain freedoms
are obtained. As mentioned earlier, Freire is aware of the
gravity of the situation. He describes, for example, a
"semi-intransitive" state of consciousness in which new
literates interiorize the "dominator's style of life"
(Politics of Education 53). This occurs because peasants
have lived under domination for so long that to break out
of "unconscious" unfreedom is not to understand the
operations of domination or be able to propose viable
alternatives to them. According to Freire,
to the extent . . . that the interiorization of
the dominator's values is not only an individual
phenomenon but also a social and cultural one,
ejection must be achieved by a type of cultural
action in which culture negates culture. That
is, culture as an interiorized product that in
turn conditions men's subsequent acts, must
become the object of men's knowledge so that they
can perceive its conditioning power. (Politics
of Education 43)
The "residue" of cultural myths implicit in the lives of
people who have long been denied access to self and social
control is not easily wiped away.
The use of Freire's argument for us becomes
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increasingly complex at this point, so it is important to
keep in mind the political arena in which Freire's thoughts
persist. Freire understands that interiorization of
oppression is not simply a discrete psychological event.
Populist leaders, for whom Freire has measured use, often
degenerate into manipulators who manipulate "the masses
since [they] cannot manipulate the elite" (Politics of
Education 78). More insidious is the manipulative elite,
often an even self-professed goodhearted elite, which
undertakes to make people literate out of humanitarian
rather than humanist motives and who turn literacy into a
"specialism" which terminates thinking. Of specialists
Freire says, "Because they have lost the vision of the
whole of which their specialty is only one dimension, they
cannot even think correctly in their specialty" (Pol itics
of Education 88). Oppressors dispense "false generosity"
whose source is "an unjust social order" which creates the
space for charity (Pedagogy 29). In a matter-of-fact but
no less chilling observation, Freire describes the "moment
of surprise among . . . the elites in power when they find
themselves unmasked by the masses" (Politics of Education
77), chilling because, as Freire says, recognition by the
oppressor of his status "does not necessarily lead to
solidarity with the oppressed" (Pedagogy 34).
The aegis of oppression, under which literacy
operates, thus appears to exist not merely outside of
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literacy but outside of "intent." Humanitarian teachers,
newly literate peasants, populist (and, presumably, pro
capitalist) leaders, the very down-trodden who behave in a
"prescribed" manner— all contribute to the oppression of
massive numbers of people (Politics of Education 31). How
can such diversity contribute to such totalitarian goals?
The question is so central that it has formed the basis of
much philosophical inquiry since the Second World War.
Freire does not supply the answers because he, too, is
still forming the questions. As prefigured in the early
part of this chapter, these questions concern some highly
abstract yet often palpable concerns: subjectivity,
consciousness, social formation and re-formation, and
"human development."
Freire's significant contribution to the question is
his delineation of the economic dualities of literacy. He
is also willing to acknowledge that his own understanding
is subject to revision. As he says of apparent clashes
between teachers and students, philosophy and pragmatics,
that is why reflection is only legitimate when it
sends us back— as Sartre insists— to the concrete
context where it seeks to clarify the facts.
. . . In throwing light on an accomplished
action, or one that is being accomplished,
authentic reflection clarifies future action,
which in its given time will have to be open to
renewed reflection. (Politics of Education 153)
Such is Freire's attitude, as Kenneth Burke might say,
about his vocation, the vocation of completing oneself, the
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vocation of "becoming more fully human" (Pedagogy 28). Yet
Freire's most pressing dilemma is still with us. How, in
his words, can "the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic
beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their
"liberation" (Pedagogy 33)? His answer is dramatic but
arbitrary: students and teachers of literacy must assume
"a radical posture," a posture of solidarity.
Unfortunately, in Freire's theoretical scheme, the Achilles
heel of such a posture is a romantic, ineffectual
explanation of choice itself.
The first signs of a breakdown in Freire's argument
occur not in his deliberations on the freeing qualities of
literacy but on literacy's counterpart enterprise—
domination. About domination, Freire is reductive and
highly metaphorical; many metaphors are well known. In the
Freire archive are a number of counter-literacies; they
work on several destructive models: "banking" or
"digestion," "invasion" or "transmission," "filling" or
"emptying" (as in emptying form of content). Freire
interchanges the terms at will, yet they signal problems
not merely of operation but of who does what to whom.
These terms, in other words, conflict rather than conflate,
confuse rather than facilitate. For example, there is a
general lack of distinction between occasions for invasion,
that which teachers ostensibly do, and occasions for
digestion, the province of students. The metaphor of
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"banking" alternates between student and teacher:
In banking education an educator replaces self-
expression with a 'deposit' that a student is
expected to 'capitalize.' The more efficiently
he does this, the better educated he is
considered. (Politics of Education 21)
Yet teachers themselves can work feats of transmission
without themselves being aware: "Such an educator can
simply repeat what he has read and often misunderstood,
since education for him does not mean an act of knowing"
(Politics of Education 51). The same applies to clear
thinking ideologues: "If a social worker chooses
reactionary options, his or her methodology and work will
be oriented toward blocking change . . . he'll be
preoccupied with mythicizing reality" (Politics of
Education 39) .
The summary image one gets from Freire is, therefore,
chaotic. There are colonised teachers or colonised
students, malign teachers and unwitting students, students
and teachers complicitous and stealthy, or other
combinations* The central problem is that the model of
thought in this conception is awry; it differs completely
from the model Freire assumes when he speaks of an
alternative, radical framework for the teaching and
learning of liberating literacy. Under domination,
teachers and students have become not merely consumers of
literacy but they have been consumed kn£ literacy. The word
is transcendant, and the interchange between word and
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reality has been lost. Freire says as much about any given
word. A word, he believes, exists two-dimensionally; it is
reflective and it implies action. Deprived of either
dimension, it becomes an untrue word. Action becomes
"activism," reflection, "verbalism" (Pedagogy 75-6). The
procedures of "banking" and "depositing" are thus
facilitated, albeit the province of interest is confused.
In the extended, Americanized version of this
transformation, or contractualization, "banking" turns into
a distributive model of skills. The model is technical and
busies itself with measuring skill levels, skill
competences, normalisation, etc. Yet it is difficult to
believe that skills are somehow distributed, especially
literacy skills. Are skills thus warehoused, also? The
two metaphors, "banking" and "distributing," combine
easily, yet as this analysis maintains, without verity. It
would be much more to the point to observe that banking is
a useful metaphor in countries where there are banks rather
than to posit universal receptacles in people's minds,
receptacles open for deposit or withdrawal. In other
words, whereas people can be made passive, or can be
colonised, emptied, invaded, capitalized upon, or, as
Freire believes "conscientized," literacy by itself does
not do it to them.
Freire might well agree; but his argument argues
otherwise. Perhaps he has simply worked so long within
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societies that deal with people as though they were indeed
accounts payable, indemnified or worthless, that he sees
these circumstances as philosophical. His reaction,
therefore, is to widen the dualities as far as possible,
both recognizing their scope and working within their
complexities, but not deconstructing them. Given this
problem, few are as honest and eloquent as he. Freire
recognizes the points in the debate. In his words, at
length:
I could be completely wrong, but even with a
Marxist critical viewpoint, the problem of
comprehending the role of subjectivity in history
is a factor, a real problem we must confront
head-on by the end of the century. Subjectivity
relates to the problem of freedom, the world's
reconstruction, and revolution, a revolution that
has to eliminate or, at least, legislate
subjectivity so that it follows the designs of
objective thinking. Right now it seems to me to
be epistemologically incomprehensible.
Therefore, for me, all of these issues must be
properly addressed by the end of the century—
problems like the role of social movements and
the issues of power. Because I am extremely
concerned with seeing a vital role for
subjectivity and consciousness in the making of
history, I now feel that in the transforming
society, the important task is not to take power
but to reinvent power. (Politics of Education
179 )
So, Freire is stymied by an epistemological morass that
subverts (or subsumes) subjectivity; at the same time he
feels subjectivity requires new definitions, new
understanding. This is clearly evident in the unorthodox
way he speaks of "objective thinking" in the above passage,
for until this point, "object" has signified non-thinking
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for Freire. He, therefore, does not extricate himself from
the priority of materialism. Daily life, as Henri Lefebvre
might say, comes first (Poster, Existential Marxism 255)
Yet Freire lands squarely on the problems most pressing in
current philosophy, psychology, and anthropology— the
boundaries between the self and the world and the autonomy
of the individual.
Clifford Geertz, an interpretive anthropologist,
remarks this issue from his unique vantage:
[This] refiguration of social theory represents,
or will if it continues, a sea change in our
notion not so much of what knowledge is but of
what it is we want to know. Social events do
have causes and social institutions effects; but
it just may be that the road to discovering what
we assert in asserting this lies less through
postulating forces and measuring them than
through noting expressions and inspecting them.
(34)
As Geertz says, too, "Something is happening to the way we
think about the way we think" (20). Apropos of Freire's
emphasis on the state of "subjectivity," Geertz understands
expression to articulate the depths and breadth of human
horizons. Foucault, to bolster the imminence of these new
questions, adds his voice:
What one is seeing . . . is the emergence of a
whole field of questions. . . . [H]ow is one to
specify the different concepts that enable us to
conceive of discontinuity— threshhold, rupture,
break, mutation and transformation[?]
(Archaeology 5, dash replaces parentheses)
The world is changing; we may no longer be able to maintain
an ontology of behavioral ends.
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The pertinent question for us is what is the literacy
connection within the debate about subjectivities and
objectivities. A widely given answer, only hinted at thus
far in the analysis, is that literacy confers special
powers, the powers of humanity. To be wanting in literacy
is to be wanting in human fulfillment. To be subliterate
is to be subhuman. (Even subliterates who may have enough
money to live comfortably do not have enough culture.) Of
course, many people who lack literacy lack enough money.
In the United States, as Freire notes, there is a third
world; in global terms, there is also, and it is, also
noted, widely illiterate and exploited by literate
societies. If the "banking" metaphor is carried through,
we might suppose that these countries are empty,
unfulfilled, unprogressive societies. Yet, as Freire
warns, the answer is not to fill up with capitalist
literacy the vacancies (though this is where the
subject/object theoretical difficulty begins rather than
ends), How, then, are we to understand literacy as a vital
part of the liberation of exploited people without either
reifying literacy or the people who acquire it?
The ways, perhaps, are many, but of them one seems
clear. At the very time in which we live, we must realize
that the "banking" metaphor of literacy, or any learning,
is ideological, and we must abandon it. That metaphor, or
the model it entails, presumes a kind of subjectivity
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(variously referred to as mind, consciousness, self-
consciousness, etc.) that both privileges the literate self
and organizes social relationships. Abandoning the banking
model abandons these kinds of presumptions.
The benefits are two-edged, however, and so must be
carefully treated. On the one hand, the power of the
individual, his mind and motives, gains credence.
Individuals are not vessels. On the other hand, the
circumstances in which individuals find themselves must be
understood to carry the weight and responsibility for the
consequences of individual lives. As this pertains to
literacy, the circumstances always clear access to and the
need for a person to be literate. The society wields its
literacy more powerfully than the individual, and literate
bureaucracy is more than, say, a fight against City Hall.
A third aspect of the case is that literacy always exists
in a state of imbalance, redefinition, or re
interpretation. This is what might be called the paradox
of literacy, for whereas there can be no talk about
literacy without texts, the subject of the talk is never
the texts themselves. The subject is always the
circumstances which encompass the text. The subject is
itself the question, and how to understand its constitution
is its address. Also, of course, the pertinence of the
idea of radical literacy to the liberation of the subject
is crucial. What we know is that at whatever stage of
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post-literate mankind we find ourselves, literacy neither
imprisons nor frees but embodies the enormous complexities
of how and why some people live comfortably and others do
not. This, of course, requires proof, for it is not a
generally accepted idea.
About ten years after John Holt wrote How Children
Fail, a number of books on the subject and in the same
diary format were published. These books have disappeared
in the eighties (replaced by the more "rigorous"
ethnographic account) but the descriptions of every-day
events in these early works help keep the content of
educational literacy on the ground. George Dennison, in
The Lives of Children, describes a young student stymied by
literacy; the student attends a New York school for
"incorrigible" elementary students. He writes of Jose:
When I used to sit beside Jose and watch him
struggling with printed words, I was always
struck by the fact that he had such difficulty in
even seeing them. I knew from medical reports
that his eyes were all right. It was clear that
his physical difficulties were the sign of a
terrible conflict. On the one hand he did not
want to see the words, did not want to focus his
eyes on them, bend his head to them, and hold his
head in place. On the other hand he wanted to
learn to read . . . and so he forced himself to
perform these actions. But the conflict was
visible. It was if a barrier of smoked glass had
been interposed between himself and the words:
he moved his head here and there, squinted,
widened his eyes, passed his hand across his
forehead. The barrier, of course, consisted of
the chronic emotions I have already mentioned:
resentment, shame, self-contempt, etc. But how
does one remove such a barrier? (81)
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Emotions. Whereas one might dispute Dennison's
articulation of personal emotions and the separation of
emotion from reason, Dennison provides an entry into the
illiterate as a subjective human being. He sees a child
who is battered by literacy and who shows it in every
visible way, and Dennison can surmise that visibility is
only the surface issue. He is right.
The issues do not become simpler once one gets under
the surface of the skin, however. This, in the most
straightforward sense, is the subjective/objective debate.
The current debates about the origins and consequences of
language and literacy range across fields long devoted to
the "subjective," however— philosophy, psychoanalysis,
literature, critical theory. Clifford Geertz observes that
the time for the debate may be early; one wonders if the
time is not already missed, the discussions now underway
the ones in which we pick up the pieces rather than
refashion them. Whichever (or neither), the issues of the
subjective ramifications of literacy, in presence or
absence, radiate across numerous social estimates of the
future of humankind. As one might expect, there is much
variation.
There is little useful scholarly work that speaks
directly to the relationship between literacy and
subjective life. The great division often proposed is that
between orality and literacy on the premise that oral
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language and oral demonstration (perhaps, even,
declamation) promote dramatically, intrinsically different
lives and societies than do reading and writing. Entire
disciplines are devoted to the explanation and elaboration
of this divide, yet the notions of orality seem curiously
facile. Much of what counts for the center of oral
discourse consists of facial expression, the temporal,
almost fleeting predisposition of oral language to
disappear, and an unusual facility for question and answer
episodes. Oral discourse is presumed to deal in pure,
committed, and dynamic meanings. If a speaker is unclear,
in other words, the oral circumstance allows for clarity,
indeed, demands it.
Finally, the broad term "subjectivity" is reduced to
the more narrow concept of "cognition," exacerbating the
subject/object, individual/society duality. Extra
ordinarily romanticized or sanitized interpretations
result.
George Steiner supplies an example. In a popular
publication, he begins an address about the "Future of
Reading" by disclaiming a future: "It is hardly necessary
. . . to cite all the evidence of the depressing state of
literacy" ("Books" 21). Steiner not only grieves the loss
of "reading in the old, private, silent sense" but suspects
dangerous consequences of the loss. He tells the story of
Erasmus who picks up a scrap of print out of the mud: "As
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he bent to pick it up, he muttered a cry of joy, overcome
by the wonder of the book, by the sheer miracle of what
lies behind picking up such a message." ("Books" 21)
Today, Steiner warns,
in a vast traffic jam on a highway or in a
Manhattan grid, we can insert a cassette of the
Missa Solemnis into a tape deck. We can, via
paperbacks and soon cable vision, demand,
command, and compel the world's greatest, most
existent, most tragic or delightful literature to
be served up for us, packaged and cellophaned for
immediacy. These are great luxuries. But it is
not certain that they really help in the
constant, renewed miracle that is the encounter
with the book. ("Books" 24)
Literacy is, to some extent, private and solitary, but the
magical nature of Steiner's connections is too pat. If
Erasmus can find pleasure in a surprise message in the
dirt, cannot a reader of computer bulletin boards find a
similar pleasure? Steiner, if questioned, may not want to
push an alphabetic argument, for his past work supercedes
his latest appeal. However, the voice he gives to a prima
facie spiritualism of the text is reported by many.
As romantic as turning pages may seem to the reader or
writer who has time to do so, the argument for technology
involves suppositions about the structures of thinking
which literates either possess, demonstrate, or choose to
exercise at will. Here, questions of cognition become more
or less transformed into questions about memory, right or
left brain capabilities or motor coordination. Disciplines
devoted to the study of literacy from this perspective tend
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to speak of the "cognitive structure" of an individual's
mind or of the "thinking process." Within linguistics, and
recently, the composition/rhetoric field, attempts to draw
models of writing have proliferated in works as diverse as
that of Kintch and Van Dijk, M.A.K. Halliday, Clark and
Clark, on the one hand; and Flower and Hayes, and Richard
Gephardt, on the other. The former teams search for the
structures of transition within sentences; the latter, for
structures of transition between the reading and writing
processes. All are concerned to draw a logical map of
cognitive reality, a reality reflected either within the
text or the behaviour of the reader/writer. In each case,
however, the researchers make a leap between the cognitive
models they formulate out of boxes and arrows and the
models connections to the subject, a leap which is mostly
ignored.
Mike Rose's work on the cognitive writer's block is
typical. Rose sets out six cognitive dimensions of
writer's block which involve dysfunctions apropos of the
activity itself. These include premature editing, poor
planning, etc. (4-7). Rose appends to the list a picture
of what he calls a "schematic representation of selected
cognitive dimensions and functions of the composing
process." This representation places at the top of the
cognitive project "Executive Operations," and at the
bottom, "Task Environment" with two-way arrows in-between.
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"Executive Operations" are three-fold: "high level
strategies (usually based on assumptions), goals, problem
solving/composing styles." Lateral operations in the
schema consist of the "Composing Subprocesses" which
themselves consist of diverse components such as rules, in
one box, and knowledge, in another (12). Rose attributes
much of his model building to Flower and Hayes, whose
"process model" of writing also depicts a number of boxed
stages which writers negotiate arrow by arrow.
Rose and others who focus on cognitive structure draw
upon Noam Chomsky and other linguistic structuralists.
According to these scholars, the structures of the brain,
or the part of the brain that handles language, may be
understood as distinct from other aspects of a self/subject
and can also be assumed to exist universally. To wit,
everyone learns to speak, so everyone must possess the
deeply ingrained capacity to do so. Unfortunately, the
cognitive approach to literacy begs central questions.
Since the quality of the human person is itself at issue,
and since many of the empirical/cognitive researchers make
even greater divisions within the halves—
compartmentalizing people's brains into different kinds of
memories or sensitivities, for example— the issues appear
to boil back down to ideology. At best, as Rose shows in a
few of his case studies of cognitively blocked writers,
there may be
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co-variance between a quotation mark that is confidently
inscribed and a quotation mark that is correctly used (83);
however, it would appear quite difficult to describe the
structure of confidence as a grammatical artifact of the
structure of quotation marks.
Less "scientistic" in approach are Luria and Vygotsky,
yet they remain committed to perceptual structures.
Vygotsky's notion of "inner speech" postulates a
relationship between a child (a language acquirer) and a
child's world whose bridge to the adult world is language.
Susan Wells, in a recent article, "Vygotsky Reads Capital,"
likens Vygotsky's distinctions among stages of speaking
(thinking) to Marx's analysis of the relationship among
commodities. Both scholars, she says, seem "interested in
analyzing the relationship among the basic elements of a
concept rather than in narrating its concrete development"
(N. pag.). The narration of concrete development, however,
is the primary interest of many literacy theorists as they
try to turn a particular literacy event into an imprint of
structural development. Within the broader cognitive
range, the question confuses reality with the mind. Minds
are presumed to effect a reality, literacy is part of that
reality, and thus the literate mind automatically effects
unique realities. Hence, the conceptual worlds brought
forth by the literate and the illiterate are ineluctably
different.
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The research, indeed, suggests, that literates have
different structures of mind and reality from illiterates.
Frank D'Angelo's Conceptual Theory of Rhetoric attempts to
describe, for example, two literate structures, or
strategies, for effecting meaning, i.e., making sense of a
text. In a recent essay on the connection between mind and
literacy, D'Angelo summarizes the popularly held
distinctions between the illiterate and literate mind
structures. He bases the summary on a study of Luria and
summarizes a view that he, too, supports. He says,
in contrast to the kinds of abstract, conceptual
thinking found in literate people, the kinds of
thinking associated with nonliterate people is
concrete and specific, embedded in the particular
situation. Such thinking tends more toward the
sensorimotor and perceptual rather than the
conceptual. Once, however, literacy is acquired,
the way the individual perceives reality
undergoes radical restructuring. . . . There is a
dramatic transition from sensorimotor and
perceptual thinking to propositional thinking.
The thinking of nonliterate people, however,
evidently does not advance beyond the level of
what Piaget calls the stage of concrete
operations. ("Luria on Literacy" 155)
The description is a statement of the humanist
position about the technological effects of literacy; it
might be noted that similar descriptions have been made
about college-level "basic writers" in the United States,
students who appear to lack the ability to conceptualize
because their writing skills are not up to par with a
general freshman population (Lunsford).
Illiterates, many hasten to add, are not inferior in
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intelligence. According to D'Angelo some skills or
knowledge may be better acquired without the services of
literacy. But, on the whole, he says, "the ability to
conceptualize and handle abstract symbols is absolutely
necessary in a technological society" (168). Not to avail
these skills is tantamount to perpetuating "hopeless
deprivation" in the lives of many citizens" (168). Indeed,
if non-literates can be taught to conceptualize, according
to the D'Angelo scenario, the problems of illiterate life
will be solved. Such might be termed the technological
argument for paternalism. At any rate, the argument still
suffers from an undeveloped relationship between literacy
and the self of the learner. How is it, one might ask,
that literacy inspires the literate while the illiterate
toil in their own ineffectual devices?
At blame for some of the problems already articulated
is an oversimplified or underappreciated idea of self, not
to mention the social context of individual life. The
matter very slippery, but shifting emphasis from one
half of the self to another in search of literacy effects
merely prolongs the frustration. Two literacy theorists
who attempt this shift, and who openly acknowledge the
subject/object schism, are Walter Ong, an American Jesuit,
and Keith Hoskin, a professor of Classics at the University
of Warwick. Unquestionably, Hoskin's work is the more
persuasive, but since he departs from Ong (and Goody and
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Watt, to a certain extent), a review of Ong is requisite.
Although it may be fair to say that Hoskin
extrapolates from Ong' s early work on the difference
between orality and literacy, Ong1s latest research on the
effect of literacy as a technology is also pertinent. In
"Reading, Technology, and Human Consciousness," Ong says
that literacy presents a qualitatively different situation
from almost any other human scene:
Writing and reading establish a special situation
marked by absences, gaps, silences, and opacity.
Faced with a text, readers find that both the
author and original context are absent. Readers
themselves have to produce an equivalent of both-
-the equivalent, for they produce neither author
nor context in total actuality. The context is
no more, and the author, often enough, is dead.
(173)
Ong's apparent trust in the transparency of an
"actual" context is rather naive, of course, and even the
New Critics proffered more sophisticated arguments
concerning an author's ability, dead or alive, to supply
answers to the total meaning of the total context in which
a literacy event exists. Also, Ong assumes the
simplicities of face-to-face communication which presume
that speakers conduct more meaningful, clear interchange
because they are in each other's bodily presence.
Nonetheless, if the author's "death" in the above passage
is interpreted in a broad sense and "total actuality"
understood as something which may never be present, or in
any event not something more accessible to the oral
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tradition than to the literate, then Ong's attempt to
muster the effability of the technology of literacy is
useful.
Ong particularly elucidates the relationships which
texts presuppose. To interpret a text means, he says,
"inserting it somehow into the ongoing conversations you
live with" (174). At the same time, he understands that
part of the difficulty of interpretation stems from the
textuality of the relationship, itself. Indeed, he
believes, "Texts exist in relation to other texts much more
than in relation to spoken language" (176). This is to
say, as he puts it, that texts are never preterite yet are
never autonomous, either. In fact, it is the interiority
of the textual relation that singularizes it. Thus, Ong
believes that the act of reading and writing can be
construed as nothing less than "a stage in the evolution of
human consciousness, that is, in the evolution of mankind's
way of relating the human, the human interior world ..."
(179) .
The technology of literacy, therefore, provides a
singular, one might say insular, phenomenon. Its effect is
to set off a central, perhaps cataclysmic, certainly
psychic, shift in human destiny. Ong describes such a
shift repeatedly: "Without writing and print the
interiorization of consciousness that marks modern man
could not have taken place" (181), and "Of all forms of
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verbal communication, chorographic and typographic
communication— the use of writing and print— is in many
ways the most deeply interiorizing" (183), and
Writing entail [s] both the death of the old
orality and the realization of previously hidden
potentials of the word. There can be no doubt
that for the advance of human consciousness, for
its greater actualization, writing and reading,
with the interiorization they implement and
enforce, have been indispensible, absolutely
required. (185)
What is the nature and genesis of this interiorization
which human consciousness has undertaken? For Ong, part of
the answer is spiritual. Any creature who can say 1_, Ong
believes, is an interior being (179-180). Such is the de
facto argument of human/language links. A second part of
this interiority via literacy concerns silence, privacy,
decontextualization— all of the technologically availed
circumstances that distinguish literacy from orality. A
third part of the interiority argument, however, and the
part which is most suggestive but not elaborated by Ong
(who appears to be caught up in exploration of the first
two aspects of literacy) concerns the peculiar inhabitation
of literacy. The technology of writing down and reading
from, mixed with other intellectual abilities and other
technologies (electronicry, for example), produce different
or new interiors.
Coercive, technological literacy is perhaps too strong
a descriptor for Ong; perhaps dynamic would suit better.
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Yet Ong*s mission is to advance the idea of intervention,
if not that of a dialectic, between technology and the user
of it. Far from displacing orality, literacy reinforces
it, "at the same time [it] utterly transforms" other
technologies of communication,
technologies within human consciousness. . . .
Once the mind has become familiar with extensive
analytic thinking through the use of writing, it
becomes possible to proceed orally to some degree
in analytic fashion. (188)
The notion suffers from familiar overstatement.
Analytic thinking is not a product of writing— this is part
of the debate. On the other hand, one cannot simply ignore
the force of a technology that enters into lives with such
repetition and abundance as literacy and expect its
presence not to be felt. The problem which Ong encounters,
thus, is not with the difficulty of the literacy/human
interaction, for that difficulty can hardly be
overemphasized. Ong's problem, in fact, is that he settles
for oversimplification. Given the notion that the
technology of literacy affects thinking and that thinking
(human motivation) affects technology, Ong colors the
affair with a glossy sheen. Technology whirrs its messages
to people, and people from the bottom of their oral origins
reply and change the technology for the better.
One cannot help but recall other religious arguments
such as those for English translation of the Christian
Bible into "undeveloped" tongues so as to bring spiritual
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enlightenment to (usually) tribal people who can then
improve their morality and lowly lots in life. In Ong's
words:
Man and machine are more intimately related than
most persons think, but in no simple way. In the
perspectives being developed here, we must keep
in mind that technology is interiorized through
writing and print and electronics, man does not
by that simple fact become mechanized. Rather,
when technology is interiorized, machines are
humanized. Technology not only transforms
consciousness and noetic processes but is itself
transformed by consciousness. (191)
So, whereas Ong makes a determined effort to bridge the
duality between technology and the human subject, he
undermines the effort with a benign conception of both
technology and human purpose.
It is perhaps too easy (and not altogether correct) to
refer to Ong's Catholicism for an explanation;
nevertheless, it is difficult to understand the
humanization, the spiritualization, of a machine. The
concept is difficult enough when confined to industrial
contexts; the transformation from labor intensive to
information technology makes the shift even more
problematic. Most machines, from fast food dispensers to
corrugated laminators, appear little sympathetic to human
modes of production, or distribution, or consumption. It
is worth recalling Marcuse on this point. With a bluntness
born of the apprehension of technology, Marcuse says:
In the face of the totalitarian features of this
society, the traditional notion of the
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'neutrality' of technology can no longer be
maintained. Technology as such cannot be
isolated from the use to which it is put; the
technological society is a system of domination
which operates already in the concept and
construction of techniques. (xvi)
In other words, neither technology nor the human
inventor is innocent. Machines and minds may well affect
each other; yet there is no primeval impetus for the
direction of that influence. Influence is social; machines
are influential. How is that influence directed? This
question as it pertains to literacy is still unanswered.
Can the technology of the text change the course of human
thinking? If it can, is it necessary that literacy be
texts? If it is necessary, what (and how) does text yield
such power? And, finally, why, as this analysis has
suggested, is that power violent?
As against Ong, who puts his faith in an evolutionary
demand of consciousness to interiorize itself via the
exteriorization of print, Keith Hoskin offers another
approach to these questions. He suggests a technological
metamorphosis abetted by the technology of literacy but
rooted in historical demand. The value of Hoskin is that
he makes no bones about the powerfulness of the literate
technology and the social source which wields it. He says,
for example, that "the history of education _is_ the history
of writing; such is the programmatic statement I wish here
to investigate" ("History of Education" 1). At the same
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time, he claims that writing comes about historically and
institutionally as a means to control, to index, to
"double-text" the society. As he says, "If I am right
. . . a highly significant moment [is] when writing re
writes itself and discovers a new power as examination,
discipline and control ..." ("Cobwebs to Catch Flies" 4).
Hoskin's argument is complex and broad. Much of it follows
in the tradition of Michel Foucault, explaining and
defending certain of his ideas such as the power-knowledge
paradigm. Hoskin documents his theoretical claims
thoroughly with historical example, however. He describes
the instances of the introduction and eventuation of
writing within the history of Western society in order to
show how the technique becomes an artifact, an artifact the
beginnings of an institution, an institution the
enforcement of surveillance and standardization. Hoskin
shows, for example, how the definition of "learning"
changes in post-alphabetic Greece to distinguish between
teaching and learning; originally the Greek word implied no
distinction; the change accommodated ideas of successful,
authoritative teaching despite student failure to learn.
Hoskin shows how forgeries in eleventh century Rome begot a
system of dating and multiple copying by the thirteenth
century, and he traces the adoption by Cambridge University
in the eighteenth century of a system of written
examinations in order to weed out deviants who had not
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acquired the proper competences. These competences then
became set curricula and
written performance becomes a record or archive
of the individual; it begins to be given a
mathematical 'mark,1 the marks form a
distribution, and the individuals a ’population'
of subjects objectively known through their
possession of quantified attributes. . . .
("Cobwebs" 13; also "The Examination" 144)
The history of writing, Hoskin may have asserted,
appears to be a history of examination.
Thus Hoskin traces very good cases for the social
aggrandizement of literacy. He repudiates the idea of
"triumphant" technology that Marshall McLuhan and Neil
Postman advance, observing that "new discourses may become
possible but they do not eventuate in an historic vacuum"
("History of Education" 5); and he concerns himself with
"regimes of truth" more than with ideas of "truth as such"
("History of Education" 15). There is, nevertheless,
Hoskin's intrigue with the technology itself which is at
once insightful and troubling.
Unlike those who invest in the virtuous transcendance
of literacy, Hoskin finds the technology of Western
literacy a rational contradiction. Within the tradition of
Foucault, Hoskin sees the advent of literacy as an
historical reality with a supra-historical potential: "I
would like to argue more," he says, "that the
power/knowledge significance of writing is transformed by
the alphabetic breakthrough. The alphabetic Logos produces
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the qualitative new power as it produces new power-
knowledge" ("History of Education" 2). He explains that
the alphabet
remains an extraordinary breakthrough; apparently
invented only once, by the Greeks, it is the
purest of traces— at best a trace, and never an
absolute representation of writing of the spoken
(that is the secret of its success). ("History
of Education" 4)
Yet it is the repeatability of this invention that
holds the greatest fascination for Hoskin.
In a prescient, complicated observation, Hoskin
concludes that the alphabet itself is an inverse
hermeneutic, a contradiction that contradicts itself and
thereby extends its power. There is the technological
compactness (economy) of the alphabet and there is the
pursuit of meaning, a pursuit engaged in differently in
oral and literate systems (regimes) of truth. The result
is that the "theoretical structure of the sign system" uses
its "standardizing quality" to standardize ambiguity; the
entire realm of communication, post-alphabetic literacy, is
permanently destabilized ("Cobwebs" 23) Thus, the
definition of power as well as the usurpation and
maintenance of power, and all in-between, depends on new
ways not merely of making literate rules but of
interpreting them. Autonomy, or power, comes to assume a
double face: A literate is able to go beyond mimesis yet a
literate is never entirely understood. As Hoskin states
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it, "Silent reading and writing remove the right to one's
own voice even as they are apparently doing the opposite"
("Cobwebs" 13). "Learning becomes more complex, extended
through changes over time. Error is no longer temporary
but temporal, endemic to the textual puzzle. The Reader is
now part of the problem" ("History of Education" 23).
Indeed, the intriguing dimension to Hoskin's analysis
is that he keeps inserting the social feature. This
distinguishes him from many others who theorize about the
impact of literacy. Nevertheless, Hoskin wants literacy
both ways, and in the end he opts for a bottom-line
subjectivity. In its own effable way, the alphabet of
Hoskin's scheme possesses its own powers; it demonstrates
an ambiguity for which it is responsible and through which
it facilitates or undermines communication. Hoskin's
alphabet keeps its own counsel, and the world is rendered
indeterminate in alphabetic ways. Thus, he says, "after
and through the alphabet, pedagogy takes on a new power for
itself, its practitioners and its knowledge" ("History of
Education" 8). Never traveling alone, literacy undauntedly
imports irresistible effects. The learning of literacy is
the submission to it, "to be shaped in certain ways" by the
"pedagogy of print" ("History of Education" 10). For
Hoskin, indeterminacy is not merely a fact of literate
life; it is literate life.
There is a certain fascination to Hoskin's ideas, and
139
certainly many of them are on target. As Hoskin says,
literacy is a unique, apparently one-time invention, and
its uniqueness makes literacy a technology unlike any other
and indescribable as any other. But literacy is not itself
ineffable, and this is what Hoskin forgets. As profound as
the technology of literacy is, it is a technology. It is
an invention. Literacy, simply, is not natural, and much
results from this.
The current discussion began with questions about the
synthesis between personal and social forces in the
instance of literacy. As evidenced in the work of Freire,
literacy appears to support contradictory alternatives; it
offers liberation or imprisonment. Further, it assumes an
intrepid, clandestine persona in its ability to coerce or
colonise the consciousness of literates or those who would
be so. Of course, there has never been any doubt about the
force of literacy; it coincides everywhere with social
change. Literacy changes lives. The question is about the
process, however; how does the change proceed? Is the head
invaded by literate capabilities? Is human history
re-written by an inhabited pen? Or do individuals rewrite
the course of human history via or through or regardless of
the existence of text? As crude or broad as these
questions may sound, they have not been disposed of. They
are questions of human history as well as questions of
contemporary education, and they involve literacy from its
140
inception to the present day. When one asks about human
history in this way, however, one asks how literacy is
human. The only sure answer is that literacy does not
know. it is odd to think that it might. Yet this notion
of an autonomous force called literacy is precisely the
concept Hoskin advances.
Unfortunately, Hoskin's ideas are embraced by others
in exactly the ways they are wrong. These ways embrace the
autonomy of literacy, and these ways validate exploitation
of the powerless. The net result is a literacy deeply
anti-material, mysteriously yet authoritatively subjective,
and finally un- or other-worldly. Seen in this way,
literacy promises escape as it ensures domination.
There is no simple avenue into these issues. The
assumptions of an autonomous literacy, however, rest on
presumptions about the nature of orality. Touched on
earlier, these presumptions dichotomize orality and
literacy; more than this, they attribute widely divergent,
and dangerous, features to each. Baldly stated, orality is
presumed to indicate tidier instances of verbal
communication and more forthright needs to communicate at
all. Autonomous literacy presumes simplistic orality. The
reasoning is tangled, of course; forthrightness does not
equate with simplicity, and simplicity is not concommitant
with unrestricted choice. Yet somehow orality takes the
higher moral, or noble, ground while literacy resolves the
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questions of morality/ in addition to all the other
questions. Orality, thus, is nicer than literacy but
dumber.
To s e e how t h e s e o d d i t i e s o f i d e a s c o m e a b o u t , i t i s
w o r t h p u s h i n g H o s k i n ' s t y p e o f a r g u m e n t t o i t s l o g i c a l e n d .
I r o n i c a l l y , t h o s e w ho h a v e a l r e a d y d o n e s o a r e o f t e n
H o s k i n ' s p r e d e c e s s o r s w h o h a v e b e n e f i t t e d r e t r o a c t i v e l y
f r o m h i s t h o u g h t . T h e i r g r e a t e s t b e n e f i t d e r i v e s f r o m
H o s k i n ' s a s s i g n m e n t t o t h e l i t e r a c y s i g n - s y s t e m a n i n h e r e n t
u n s p e a k a b l e n e s s . F o l l o w i n g a r e w h a t we m i g h t c a l l t h e
s y n c h r o n i c c o n s e q u e n c e s o f s u c h a n a s s i g n m e n t .
George Steiner, a predecessor of Hoskin earlier
mentioned, displays in his most acclaimed book, After
Babel, this kind of reverence for an unfathomnable
alphabet. Steiner describes an esoteric, universal
relationship with language. He thinks that the mystery of
linguistics is unlimited. He believes that language is
what we should think about most. Yet, contained by human
and linguistic frailties, this is precisely what we cannot
do. The contemplation of language is its nemesis. The
task is Sisyphean; when we think of language, we go
backwards: "There is an inescapable ontological autism, a
proceeding inside a circle of mirrors, in a conscious
reflection on (reflection of) language" (110). Steiner's
sentence is proof of the pudding. Language is as language
hides. One comes away with difficult notions of universes
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of autism, people as linguistic secrets, and enfeebled
human beings dominated by their own letters.
Much of Steiner could be chalked up to overwroughtness
were it not both for his didacticism and for his
corroboration. Steiner's paen to the alphabet pales
compared to Eric Havelock's, for instance. Havelock makes
more clear the strains of power literacy heard in Hoskin,
Ong, Vygotsky, and others. Whereas Hoskin tinkered with
the nuance of alphabet, and Steiner stepped back from it,
Havelock enshrines it.
Preface to Plato notwithstanding, Havelock announced
in the 1978 essay, "The Alphabetization of Homer," the
definitive moment of literacy. The "original act" of
literacy, he says
was something like a thunderclap in human
history, which our bias of familiarity has
converted into the rustle of papers on a desk.
It constituted an intrusion into culture, with
results that proved irreversible. (3)
He continues, "It laid the basis for the destruction
of the oral way of life and the oral modes of thought" (3).
One wonders at the collocation of oral culture with
oral "modes of thought," but Havelock allows little time
for distinction. He conceives the development of literacy
as an oddly stultifying yet mobilizing phenomenon in the
history of consciousness, the force of literacy veritably
coming up against itself to form post-literate forms of
thought. He says,
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as documentation takes place, a restless, moving
sea of words becomes frozen into immobility.
Each self-contained moment of recitation . . .
becomes imprisoned in an order no longer acoustic
but visible. It ceases to be a soundtrack and
becomes almost an intangible object. A
collocation of such objects takes place as they
are gathered and written. Because they are now
preserved outside the individual memories of
those who inscribe and gather them, the gatherer
need no longer surrender himself totally and
temporarily to absorption in any of them. He is
able to look at them in the mass and become aware
of them as a sum, a totality. As he does this he
begins to wake up from the dream. (18)
The dream?
In spite of its stealth and growing inevitability,
this encomium nevertheless catches one up short. The
themes of literacy have been rumbling under the surface of
peroration, but now they come together, all of a claim.
Havelock turns the theoretical pining after literacy into a
daily, routine metaphor. There is a difference between
literate and non-literate life. The nonliterate lives in a
dream, in a world of make-believe, in a state of "total
absorption." (One recalls Delattre's distinction between
insiders and outsiders here, the distinction between
twentieth century literates and illiterates.) The
literate, on the other hand, actually lives.
It must be emphasized that Havelock is not endorsing
cultural relativity. He is not taking positions of
cultural difference or need, positions taken by Scribner
and Cole and even Henry Giroux. Indeed, Havelock is
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voicing the fundamental claim for the power of literacy
which explains, he believes, not merely post-literate
history but pre-literate, as well— explains, demarcates,
evaluates. The thing to understand about literacy, he
says, is that it makes minds. He is bolder. Literacy
makes great minds. One need only view the seas of
documentation that celebrate the cataclysm that literacy
is. What a pity for cultures unlucky in alphabet, he might
add, and, indeed, he does.
Havelock's argument has rested on a comparative
analysis of two alphabets, one good, one bad. The bad one
is cuneiform; the good one is the linear Greek alphabet.
Havelock studies two passages in the two alphabets,
passages about the great flood. He counts the number of
repetitive words in each passage. He discovers that the
cuneiform users, the Mesopotamians, repeated themselves
more often than the Greeks. He decides that this is
because they had recourse to fewer words they could write
down. This is because they had an alphabet that could not
be shaped to unnumerable ideas— unlike the Greek alphabet.
The consequence of this is that the Mesopotamians, who may
or may not have had rich ideas, could transmit only a
certain number of them, and they were the ideas that could
be accommodated by an incommodious alphabet (9).
Yet how is an untransmitted idea an idea? This is a
dilemma for Havelock. He attempts to skirt the issue. He
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assumes, at base, that the powerfulness of a technology is
prior to the genesis of ideas. Per communication, he says,
"linguistic statements [can] be remembered and repeated
only as they [are] specially shaped" (4). When language is
solely spoken, it is the ears that do the shaping,
a c c o r d i n g t o H a v e l o c k . H o w e v e r , l i t e r a c y b r i n g s t o b e a r
"an automatic marriage" between sound and symbol, the
symbol system possessing "a unique phonetic efficiency" (4)
t h a t s u i t s a l l n e e d s . S i g n s y s t e m s , t h u s , e n c o u r a g e p e o p l e
to "pack" into language (Havelock says "poetry") "the full
variety of expression which . . . description calls for"
(9). Unfortunately, he assesses, "the deficiencies of
cuneiform as an instrument of acoustic-visual recognition"
discourage the composer from maximum packaging (9).
Havelock concludes.
We must presume, therefore, that behind the
scribal [Mesopotamian] version of the flood,
which is all we have, lies hidden forever, and
lost to us forever, a far richer epic, which,
obeying the law of cultural storage, performed
for those cultures the functions that Homer
performed for pre-literate Greece. (9)
Even the spoken lingua of Mesopotamians was "probably
less sophisticated," however (9). The Mesopotamians
apparently couldn't master rhyme any better than they could
get all their thoughts on papyrus.
The mess that this argument is in is extraordinary.
T h e b e s t w a y t o d e a l w i t h i t i s t o e x t r i c a t e o u r s e l v e s
q u i c k l y a n d d e c i s i v e l y . T h i s i s n o t t o s a y w i t h e a s e ,
146
however. Havelock has the full weight of ideology and
academic tradition behind him; he says what literates want
to hear, and he says it to the literates who have the most
to gain, or did. One need only think of the vast academic
rationalizations of those who lose out to literacy— who
fail to overcome an "oral" tradition in order to enter the
more standard literate one. Indeed, Havelock's argument _is
the familiar rustle of paper on school desks, and as long
as desk sitters control the direction of their future, they
will continue to justify their right to do so. Certainly,
Havelock does.
T h e r e b u t t a l t o H a v e l o c k i s t w o f o l d ; e a c h o v e r l a p s t h e
o t h e r .
Havelock himself names the most readily apparent
problem. His model of literacy, of comprehension of
literacy, is one of transmission. He places his stock in a
top-down, sending operation that presumes a crystallization
of the "content" of spoken words and "precipitate[s] a
deposit upon the bottom" (4). Havelock's confusion over the
apparent variance among ideas in words, ideas before words,
and ideas in print is thus understandable. As long as he
cannot see a dialectic nature for the understanding and
birth of ideas, he must force distinctions. Thus, although
it is easy for him to postulate the pre-existence of ideas
that may be lost forever, "linguistically speaking," to a
deficient alphabet, he cannot articulate what those ideas
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might be like or what uses they might have served, unless
the uses mirror the same ideas promulgated in Westernized
alphabets. This, at the very least, is an argument from
superciliousness. It hardly has any force anymore, of
course, as an intellectual argument.
The second problem is closer to the theoretical vest
woven by Hoskin. Havelock's position of oral versus
literate idea-production simplifies as follows: Oral
communicators not only communicate less, they have less to
communicate. Hoskin is not so concerned to disparage oral
possibilities. But, his attempts to render the sign-system
productive dovetail with Havelock's denigration of the oral
intellect. The upshot of the Mesopotamian-Greek comparison
is little else than an insincere headshake over the inutile
loss of something which Western society could do quite well
without. The underlying dissensions between oral and
literate discourses are not mere sadnesses, however. They
are ideological supports.
This second aspect of Havelock's argument for literacy
amounts to what Hoskin might call an example of the
"double-texted" situation. ("Cobwebs" 1) Literacy accounts
for a great deal of communication, but it gains position by
accounting better than other methods. In Havelock's
paradigm, the other methods are one— orality. Thus, what
orality lacks, literacy must supply and ultimately replace.
Havelock's opposition between the oral and the literate
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leads to certain conclusions that not only relegate the
oral mind to secondary status but question its inherent
ability. Put succinctly, the complexity of literacy
obliterates the simplicity of orality. Where oral
discourse is tidy, literate discourse is explosive. Two
additional notions are closely tied to this.
The first is that oral discourse gives itself to
mimesis. This has been prefigured by Hoskin; indeed, for
him mimesis constitutes the generative aspect of oral
communication. Oral discourse is remembered exactly and
passed on. With literacy, as Hoskin says, one can do one's
own work; not so with orality.
Second, oral ideas presumably are both truer and
uncomplex, thus more apt to be passed on. This is over and
against the complexity signified in literacy. Orality is
verity; literacy, ambiguity. Simplicity, Havelock
acknowledges, is fine; but he prefers complexity.
Literacy, indeed, as Hoskin might say, doubles the ledgers
as well as the entries.
Whereas the supposed facility of oral communication
and its tendency to restrict (simplify) interpretation and
variation of transmitted ideas must certainly elicit
challenge, such ideas are traditional, particularly within
academia. Even scholars of oral discourse such as Deborah
Tannen speak of the efficacy of gesture to convey accurate
thought in counterposition to analogous literate
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conventions, such as commas and exclamation points, which
prove unreliable, unwieldy and distant. These ideas are
fraught with overgeneralized misconceptions, however.
Notions of accuracy, as well as the rather rudimentary
trade between commas and voice-pauses, say, highlight the
need for more cross-disciplinary research.
Literacy is a complicated item; is orality less
complex? If it is, are oral people simpler than literate
counterparts? Are "oral thinkers" given to more consistent
(persistent?), if constrained, ideas? A positive answer to
these questions is the bedrock of Havelock and his
colleague's arguments. But are these differences real?
Are oral subjectivities cut from a different cloth than
literate? This study suggests that they are not. Indeed,
there is no cloth. It is merely out of western economic
necessity that we presume there is.
As oblivious as Havelock may be to the platitudinous
basis on which his divisions between oral and literate
capabilities rest, current versions of the noble savage
story, however, continue to serve interests and propel
energetic work within fields of linguistic and social
study. In this respect, we might look at a final example
of the subjective sanction of literacy to attempt to
understand how these collisions between individuals and
literacy, literacy and history, history and human purpose
occur. Indeed, it may be wise to focus on collision
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courses rather than on efforts to smooth them. Where we
have to begin, however, is at the point of human
definition, where all literacy discussions automatically
take their cue but rarely their voice. One type of socio-
linguistic case serves our purpose. This is the case of
the "wild child," who aside from other features is
identified on the basis of absent or aberrant linguistic
heritage. Such cases exist on the borders of disciplinary
studies, but because they do, they clarify those standard
boundaries. Of interest here is how the socio-linguistic
perception and treatment of "wildness" informs our
understanding of the relationship between literacy and
life.
The most recent wild child case is that of Genie,
whose story is told by Susan Curtiss, a teacher and
researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles,
who worked with Genie for a number of years. It was
largely through the efforts of Susan Curtiss that Genie
learned language; of interest to Curtiss was Genie's
ability to do so. Underlying her interest was a genuine
concern and compassion, but her efforts may be subject to
criticism, nonetheless. Curtiss' efforts, in other words,
remark the priorities of the larger society.
Before Genie was found, and Curtiss began working with
her, Genie was imprisoned until age twelve in a room in her
house, isolated from most persons except her father.
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Curtiss describes Genie's circumstances as follows:
Hungry and forgotten, Genie would sometimes
attempt to attract attention by making noise.
Angered, her father would often beat her for
doing so. In fact, there was a large piece of
wood left in the corner of Genie's room which her
father used solely to beat her whenever she made
any sound. During these times, and on all other
occasions that her father dealt with Genie, he
never spoke to her. Instead, he acted like a
wild dog. He made barking sounds, he growled at
her; and if he wished to merely threaten her with
his presence, he stood outside the door and made
his dog-like
noises. . . . (6)
G e n i e w a s s p o t t e d b y a s o c i a l w o r k e r a n d w a s r e m o v e d
f r o m t h e h o m e . T h e f a t h e r c o m m i t t e d s u i c i d e .
What happened to Genie is that at the same time she
was cared for socially she also became an experiment. The
focus of the experiment was Genie's process of acquiring
language, measured against a battery of linguistic tests to
discover the extent to which Genie acquires language like
other children or if her acquisition is skewed or limited.
Genie was tested, eventually, for her grammar, for her
phonemes, for "simple negation," "simple modification (one
adjective + noun)," etc. On the basis of the "Many, Most,
Few, Fewest" test, Curtiss concluded that "Genie's
performance indicates that she does not understand any of
these qualifiers" (135). Perhaps, Curtiss thought, Genie's
bad mood at the time of the test accounts for the failure
or perhaps Genie does not understand the questions.
Curtiss often experienced problems on these issues,
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for Genie was not easily motivated. Curtiss says pointedly
in the beginning,
Testing [Genie] was often extremely problematic
and difficult. Especially in the first year of
my work with her, getting Genie to attend to the
test and respond in a meaningful way was
difficult. As time passed, however, both of us
became more successful with one another and I
learned better how to work around her moods, to
motivate her, and to get her to perform. (38)
T h e l a s t w o r d s i n t h e s t a t e m e n t a r e u n s e t t l i n g b u t
instructive. Their intimations are borne out, finally, in
C u r t i s s ' c o n c l u s i o n s . S h e d e c i d e s t h a t w h e r e a s G e n i e may
have done badly on tests, "in real-life situations, Genie
appears to comprehend almost everything that is said to
her" (142). Curtiss continues:
Genie's language is far from normal. . . .
[However], over and above the specific
similarities and differences that exist between
Genie's language and the language of normal
children, we must keep in mind that Genie's
speech is rule-governed behavior, and that from a
finite set of arbitrary linguistic elements she
can and does create novel utterances that
theoretically know no upper bound. These are the
aspects of human language that separate it apart
from all other animal communication systems.
Therefore, abnormalities notwithstanding, in the
most fundamental and critical respects, Genie has
a language. (204)
And if Genie did not? How unlike normal children
would Genie be? How much closer to other "animal
communication systems" would she come, and what would that
mean about Genie? Curtiss' conclusion that Genie has a
language is not merely a conclusion about Genie's language
but about the pedigree that language confers. Genie speaks
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in rule-governed ways; therefore, Genie is human. The
question is why Genie was ever presumed to be other than
human, as her name ironically implies from an inverse
perspective, indeed, Havelock's noble perspective. If
Genie really were suspected to be magical, would she
require the "Many, Most, Few, Fewest" test?
It is clear in the situation of this wild child that
the father is the inhuman creature, not Genie. It is clear
that the important issue is not whether Genie can use
language as normal children can or if she can acquire
language after twelve mute years. The real issue is
whether Genie can ever inhabit a world in which language
users no longer abuse her. Language researchers, of
course, do not abuse her as her father did. They do not
beat Genie and, in fact, have ensured a family life for
her. But one asks rather bleakly if there are not more
productive ways to see human beings, especially human
beings so obviously victimized, than to judge them against
a language standard. Genie is not a black child denied
reading skills because of "black dialect," but the two are
close. Remarkable is the immutable reverence with which
the idea of language is treated such that the standard of
language persists as though there were no other standards.
Language to literacy, orality to alphabet, are bare steps
in the conceptual leap. The bottom line remains the
subdividing of human entities, and the reality is that
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literacy is an exceedingly powerful way to maintain the
separation. Genie may have been il-1inguistic for the most
macabre reasons; she still lives under the domination of a
society that reduces her "human status" accordingly.
The case of Genie's language and the example of
Havelock's literacy share a common bond. The base line
against which Genie's linguistic ability is judged arises
from the "ideal" (Chomskian) world of perfect speakers and
circumstances, total clarity. The literacy of Havelock
embraces purely literate ideas. In both systems, the
language system is impervious, removed from social concerns
(which is not to say that language never changes). Because
language systems shape subjectivity, indeed, sponsor it,
the difference between literate and illiterate
sensibilities is seen as marked. What we should do,
Havelock would assert, is enrich. Non-literates must be
brought into richer life; if nothing else, this is the
American way. After all, well-formed subjectivities, like
well-formed sentences, demonstrate adjustment, and
adjustment is not concerned with scattering the fruits of
diversity among different peoples and countries.
Certainly, on the basis of current arguments, literacy
possesses clout precisely as it transcends and is superior
to diversity.
There is another way to understand literacy, however,
one that locates it within its social context, a social
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context changed by it. To approach that way we might
consider the example of Fernand Braudel in his
extraordinary survey, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-
1800. Braudel writes at one point of the ways and
technologies of past lives which both shape and elude
present realities. He reminds us constantly of how people
and "frames," to use a socio-linguistic term, act on each
other. In a chapter on houses, clothes, and fashion (the
"codes" one might say of visible life), Braudel observes a
dialectic between people and the constraints they face or
live in, as occupants of their own world. What he shows is
that de jure is not de facto, whether the frame is made of
housing or linguistic material. Limitation is not
codified, even if it seems it should be. In "constrained"
civil cirumstances, he says,
repetition was all the more natural as building
material varied little and imposed certain
limitations on every region. This does not mean,
necessarily, that civilizations lived absolutely
according to the restrictions imposed by stone,
brick, wood or earth. But these materials often
did constitute long-lasting limitations. ’It is
lack of stone,' a traveler noted, 'that obliges
[the Persians] to build walls and houses of
earth.' In fact, they were built of sun-dried
bricks. 'Rich people decorate the outside walls
with a mixture of whitewash, Mucovy green and
bricks, and gum which makes them look silvery.'
None the less they were still unfired bricks, and
geography explains why, though it does not
explain everything. Human beings also had a say
in the matter. (193; emphasis added)
Building materials, in other words, affected the kinds
of buildings people lived in, and still do. However, clay
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and soil do not a house make, and they do not dictate that
houses are shaped into squares or roofs into A-frames. As
Braudel observes later, even after the frail tent could
have been replaced, it was not— though when it was, the
stability of housing affected the stability of lives in
many ways (197).
Alphabets and ideas, communications and the humans who
communicate, might be viewed in similar (though less crude)
ways, at least as a corrective to Havelock. What we must
do is relocate discussions about literacy within
discussions about communications and society, the same way
discussions of brick and mud must become issues of more and
less housing, rich and poor dwellings, heated and unheated
possibilities.
Hoskin, for example, had only a short distance to go
to forge this alliance. We might recall how carefully he
links the exigence of forgery in Roman documents with the
appearance of literacy; yet the conclusions Hoskin draws
are conclusions about literacy, "its own power-knowledge
logic" ("History of Writing" 15). Literacy is the minor
point in the discussion, however; the crucial issue is how
and what and who forged documents. Which Romans claimed
the privilege to abuse the privilege of writing? And what
were those consequences? Forgery surely was aided by
literacy, but what situations required aid?
Discussions of literacy must include a consideration
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of the hospitable environment where literacy can flourish.
Such an hospitable world is what Havelock (and/ in
retrospect, Ong, D'Angelo, Power, Smith) believes literacy
has called forth. But, indeed, their reasoning must be
backwards. Literacy does not call forth. A configuration
of words, as hinged into a linear script as they may be,
does not command. Even if it did, we would still have to
ask why literacy "commands" what apparently befalls
literates and why, even, some literates live by the
authoritative word while others do not.
This claim for the universal power of literacy is
little more than a double-indemnity clause in a bourgeois
insurance policy. If the power of literacy is universal,
then once we are all subjected to it, we ostensibly are all
the same, equal, equivalent. To those who have not gained
this opportunity for equality, we undertake to extend it
through literacy instruction. Yet, neither of these
presumptions holds up under scrutiny. The understanding of
literacy is not itself universal, and our reasons to act as
if it were are not either. Many of our reasons are
conventional, often selfish, and always economic. At this
time in Western, and American, history, many people do not
have to think about living. The essentials are taken for
granted. But living is always a term defined by those on
the margin of existence, as well as those securely within
the border. Those on the inside keep away the margin's
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encroachment just as assiduously as those on the outside
suffer from it. The difference is that some draw in to
survive while others pay to keep the mere survivors out.
This is to say that the purely "literate" people (whom
many academics have in mind when they discuss literacy) are
folks who have the time to contemplate their good luck.
They live as word merchants (or in productive relation to
word merchants), but since words are not things, their
labor assumes a peculiar character. What do academics,
say, or highly refined subjectivities have to sell but
their word power?
Of course, academics are not to blame for advocating a
mysterious argument about literacy which also happens to
ratify their own existence. The issue is more complex. It
begins, as this discussion has tried to show, in the
separation of object and subject and in what happens to the
definition of each when their domains are separated. Thus,
the real question is not how subject and object are
different but what each is— and, perhaps, how they share
commonalities.
The answer lies distinctly within the field of
language study. As we have seen, extensive discussion of
literacy advances the importance of human subjectivity,
human consciousness, to identify the essence of language
written and read. But what if there is no subject? Or,
put a bit more narrowly, what if there is no linguistic
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subject, no verbal individual or single linguistic
consciousness— and, moreover, no linguistic consciousness
made out of additive, individual privacies, to account for
the effects of literacy? If what has been usually taken as
a subject were an integration of social acts and histories,
acts of a nature clearly material, what would this do to
the ideas of the power of literacy and to the power of
human beings? What have we if we replace both subjective
and objective literacy with material literacy?
If the question sounds peculiar, chief among its
peculiarities is its absence. Few ask how to understand
literacy as material because few understand the term to
blur distinctions between subject and object. The absence
of the question, however, is not to be confused with the
silence of the answer.
To address the question, one of the first things we
can do is make topical the idea of a material literacy.
The second thing is to garner insights which seem counter
to prevailing conceptions of reified literacy or
subjectivized persons. Slim as these resources are, some
exist.
Chapter II dealt with the habit of treating literacy
as a thing while expressing interest in its other
(subjective) characteristics. We found numerous and
strange equivalencies between kinds of literacies, from Vai
scrolls to graffiti to kindergarten narratives. This, we
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must confess, is the current understanding of material
literacy. It is confused with objectivity. We are
reminded most starkly of this confusion by the example of
Genie. Though little is made of the fact, in certain
respects Genie is as literate as she is verbal. Too, Genie
draws, and her pictures with captions are scattered
throughout the book. Yet her reading and writing are
viewed only in terms of their contribution to her oral
progress. The researcher calls Genie's literacy "language
in a visual mode" (50).
W i t h i n m o r e " t r a d i t i o n a l " l i t e r a c y s c h o l a r s h i p , t h e
"material" perception of literacy usually masks as
d i s c u s s i o n s o f s t y l e o r r e v i s i o n . A ny n u m b e r o f e x a m p l e s
w o u l d d o , b u t P e t e r E l b o w p e r h a p s s u p p l i e s o n e o f t h e m o s t
n a i v e a n d p l e a s a n t . I n W r i t i n g w i t h P o w e r , a c o m p o s i t i o n
textbook for college students, he pleads with students to
"clean up" their language with the goals of "precision and
e n e r g y " i n m i n d . He c o n t i n u e s ,
The more you zero in on the precise meaning you
have in mind, the more you can strip away
unnecessary words and thereby energize your
language. The key activity is crossing out words
and sentences. Your new draft may have large
chunks from your raw first-draft writing,
rearranged with scissors and staples. These
sections may need extensive cutting. (34)
Elbow perceives a veritable landscape, overgrown with
staples and "unnecessary words"; his material literacy
recalls strip mining.
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Other weeders and scissors-wielders advocate similar
procedures to hack away lifeless, useless, "unenergized"
literacy. The readability experts, such as Joe Williams,
regard word count as instrumental to perspicacity. "When
we squeeze long, windy phrases into more compact phrases we
make diffuse ideas sharply specific . . . (132). Williams,
recalling Havelock, finds the shape of lives in sentences,
"the constantly changing syntactic prisms that refract
experience into its parts and order them in coherent ways"
(117). E.D. Hirsch, operating on similar planes of
vacuity, explains how to separate the teaching of
literature from the teaching of writing because one is a
breach of the other's anti-material condition:
The study of style in literature is a study of
t^ie ^usiQn form with content. But learning to
write implies just the opposite assumption; it
assumes the separation of linguistic form and
content. Learning the craft of prose is learning
to write the same meaning in different and more
effective ways. (141)
For Hirsch, as with others, the materiality of
literacy is a zero-sum proposition. Now you see it, now
you don't.
The popular idea of material literacy is entirely
compatible with the academic, an odd occurence. The August
1985 issue of Harper's Magazine devotes itself to the
demise of the book. "Will books survive," asks the lead
article, and many publishers and editors and booksellers
profess not to know. Bookstore owners say "our sales
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strategy today is to throw a bunch of books against the
wall and see which ones stick." Publishers add,
Our challenge is not just to edit valuable books
. . . but somehow to get them out to the many
book sellers who are unreceptive to them.
Recently, a man who runs a big chain [said] with
undisguised pride that 30 percent of the stock in
his stores is non-books: audio cassettes,
videotapes, posters, T-shirts, whatever. But
we're in the book business. It's supposed to be
our responsibility to get books out to people.
(42)
To b e s u r e , b o o k e d i t o r s a n d p u b l i s h e r s h a v e u n i q u e
r e a s o n s t o v a l u e b o o k s w i t h c o v e r s a n d p a g e s i n - b e t w e e n ;
t h e s e i t e m s t r a n s l a t e i n t o d o l l a r s a n d c e n t s . Y e t t h e
o v e r a l l s t o l i d i t y o f t h e n o t i o n o f l i t e r a c y i s e v i d e n t
t h r o u g h t h e v a r i o u s f i e l d s a n d s c e n e s o f A m e r i c a n l i f e . A
f i n a l e x a m p l e u n d e r s c o r e s t h i s g l a z e d v i e w o f l i t e r a c y .
The South Carolina Elections Commission in 1985
recommended that the state convert to electronic voting
machines. The machines would replace a haphazard, often
costly system of printed, dissimilar ballots. The plan was
met with grave distrust by the Budget and Control Board.
Said the treasurer of that Board, "I'm real squeamish about
something I can't see. . . ." The treasurer was
particularly concerned that "the only paper record would be
a printout of composite vote totals." The treasurer was
joined by other state officials, including the governor,
who agreed that the idea may be sound but probably
unaffordable. In fact, much of the recommendation had
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proceeded on the basis of the savings it would net for the
State (Stracener Cl).
Cost-effectiveness notwithstanding, this and other
instances of material notions of literacy are not trivial,
and they draw forceful reactions. Stanley Fish supplies a
breath-taking example of an extreme reaction. He simply
throws out the reality, i.e., the materiality, of print.
"So once again," he says, in one of his many essays, "I
have made the text disappear . . ." (173). What is to be
made of this situation? According to Fish, nothing new.
Since texts do not exist and only people do, then only
people who communicate and interpret "textual" meanings in
the same way can speak (or write) to one another. In fact,
he says, communities of speakers/writers are built of old-
boy networks, and this is how it should be:
The only 'proof of membership [in a community]
is fellowship, the nod of recognition from
someone in the same community, someone who says
to you what neither of us could prove to a third
party: 'we know.' (173)
The status quo is Fish's ultimate achievement; so is
the canon.
The real argument is not that texts, or
print/literacy, do not exist or that they exist in the
mind. Such is the argument that a subjective paradigm
dictates. On the other hand, to reduce text, the "stuff"
of literacy, to mere stuff is not only equally stupid but
dangerous. Braudel, again, shows how not to bow to
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arbitrary, culture-limited ideas. He takes an object so
presumably solid and obvious as a chair to show that its
informing idea is sitting and that sitting is politically
charged. In China, before the thirteenth century,
he says, the heighth and placement of chairs accorded
the status of people who sat in them. Moreover, there
was
also a sort of division between seated life and
squatting life at ground level, the latter
domestic, the former official: the sovereign's
throne, the mandarin's seat, benches and chairs
in schools. (210)
In other words, chairs are hardly mere objects in which one
reclines or not, just as reclining is an evolutionary, as
well as revolutionary, act.
In terms of literacy, there must be a similar view
to its material existence. Not only has the material
been confused with the physical, the physical itself
has taken on mysterious, transcendental qualities.
Literacy is taken to equal literacy from time beginning
to end. This cannot be, however. Physically, a kind
of literacy like a book may be used as a doorstop or
decoration; no doubt the collectibility of books will
increase as books become audio-cassettes and software.
The demise of the physical book, however, is the
point; the book's transformation undermines the
physics of literacy altogether. Reading is not holding
a text, writing is not moving a pencil or
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punching a keyboard, and voting is not x-ing a ballot. We
have to stop acting as though they were.
Even Freire cannot resolve the dilemma of the
subjective response to literacy because he, too, embraces
idealism, the kind which fails to grasp the materiality of
literacy and instead sees it as a physical object— a word
or picture— or as a subjective (individual) abstraction.
These are the same dualities with which he characterizes
human relationships and, finally, the human individual
(Shaull 12). The result is that Freire is delivered into
the same camp as Havelock, despite the vast differences
between them. If the mind is understood as the inscrutable
ingredient in the process of liberation, and if to try to
understand the mind is to believe it exists somewhere not
here, then the result is to lose the connection between
literacy and its value. What Freire and others need to
locate is not the mind but the ideology of mind that
undermines the connections. By locating that, they can
move toward a philosophy of language that accounts for that
ideology.
Such philosophies are not common, but V.K. Volosinov
offers one approach which has promise not merely for its
claims but for its willingness to ask the hard questions.
"What, in fact, is the subject matter of the philosophy of
language?" begins the search in Volosinov's single book,
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, "And where are we
166
to find it?” (45) A brief glimpse into Volosinov's
investigations yields alternative locations. Though
Volosinov devotes much of his efforts to resisting early
twentieth century Russian platforms of idealism,
psychologism, and linguistics, his elaborations of the
nature and force of language are remarkably salient for the
current discussion of literacy; even the caveats that such
a discussion requires pay tribute to the breadth of
Volosinov's thought. Volosinov is relentless in his attack
on the relegation of important issues to the domain of
"consciousnes," a domain which he doubts not in fact, but
in kind and degree. For Volosinov, that which exists for
human beings is that which exists between and among them,
and this social contract constitutes both individual
consciousness as well as social control. He frames the
observation with an analogy;
In order to observe the process of combustion, a
substance must be placed in the air. In order to
observe the phenomenon of language, both the
producer and the receiver of sound and the sound
itself must be placed into the social atmosphere.
(46)
Volosinov directs his efforts to establishing the utter
materiality of the word and its socio-economic presence.
In the final analysis, he refuses to give the word away,
especially to itself. This keeps him at the forefront of
all deliberations on language, but it especially places him
counter to prevailing notions of the peculiar power of
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literate words.
Volosinov begins his exegesis of language with a
critique of models of psychology because those models pre
empt a language as real as everyday life. In the late
twenties, when he wrote, he confronted an intellectual
milieu of displacement: science threatened psychology, and
psychology undermined philosophy. With a view toward a
third field, linguistics, Volosinov set about debunking
apparent advances that psychology portends. In a healthy
statement concerning the mutual ineptitude of philosophy
and psychology to handle their own claims about meaning,
Volosinov says,
Despite the deep methodological difference
between them, the idealistic philosophy of
culture and psychologistic cultural studies both
commit the same fundamental error. By localizing
ideology in the consciousness, they transform the
study of ideologies into a study of consciousness
and its laws; it makes no difference whether this
is done in transcendental or empirical-
psychological terms. This error is responsible
not only for methodological confusion regarding
the interrelation of disparate fields of
knowledge, but for a radical distortion of the
very reality under study as well. (12)
This is to say that both philosophers and psychologists
free themselves to make up laws of their own disciplines,
and when they cannot, they appeal to that which cannot be
known lawfully or cannot be observed empirically.
Thus, while consciousness becomes the sine qua non of
real meaning, it also becomes the excuse for not being able
to ascertain it. Volosinov, again, minces few words:
168
By and large, consciousness has become the asylum
ignorantiae for all philosophical constructs
[and, by extention, psychological]. It has been
made the place where all unresolved problems, all
objectively irreducible residues are stored away.
Instead of trying to find an objective definition
of consciousness, thinkers have begun using it as
a means for rendering all hard and fast objective
definitions subjective and fluid. (13)
The result is ideological power, which Volosinov
differentiates from ideological meaning.
The difference is important. It lies in a fundamental
assumption by Volosinov about how meaning is made, which
takes him into the field of linguistics. Volosinov
explores meaning as it emerges from a system of signs, a
world or realm of signs, which exists not so much apart
from physical, physiological people but immediately with
them. The thrust of the argument for literacy concerns the
sign which Volosinov considers quintessential— the word.
But first he must lay the basis for the reality of the
sign, or to put it more accurately, for its materiality.
Precedent to and reminiscent of Kenneth Burke,
Volosinov describes a sign not as a physical object but as
"an ideological product . . . not only itself part of a
reality (natural or social)," but a "converted" phenomenon
that "reflects and refracts outside of itself" (9). The
brilliance of Volosinov is that the reality of signs, the
reality outside of physical objects, is almost as real as
unsigned objects. Volosinov, in this respect, does not
169
forget food and shelter, objects or materials which are
irreducible in basic respects. However, he is adamant that
signs are material. They are actual and they cross human
beings; the material sign has no solitary or singular
identity.
The sign which every object can become becomes so by
conversion. Whereas "a physical body equals itself, so to
speak," (9) meaning requires that objects be transformed.
And transformation is complex. Thus, Volosinov says,
"Without signs, there is no ideology," (9) but he adds,
"The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs.
They equate with one another" (10) and they "occur in outer
experience" (11). Indeed, Volosinov goes far to force
studies of language to take up social relationships.
Nowhere else can signs occur. He calls such mediation a
social organization founded in "interindividual territory."
Two extraordinary implications result.
The first is that the destruction of the individual
consciousness is but the destruction of the prevailing
concept of individuality. Volosinov by no means leaves
undeveloped notions of an inner individual, notions which
include inner speech. Yet his revision of individual
consciousness is sweeping. "The individual consciousness
is a socio-ideological fact" (12). And Volosinov
delineates the false polarities set up between the
"individual" and the "social," a polarity that more
_____ 170
accurately is reflected, in his view, by the opposition of
the "social" and the "natural” (34).
The second implication is as important. The
personification of consciousness, of inter-reality, is the
word. It is language. Volosinov is terse: "The word is
the ideological phenomenon par excellence" (13). At some
length:
What is important about the word . . . is not so
much its sign purity as its social ubiquity. The
word is implicated in literally each and every
act or contact between people— in collaboration
on the job, in ideological exchanges, in the
chance contacts of ordinary life, in political
relationships, and so on. Countless ideological
threads effect in the word. It stands to reason,
then, that the word is the most sensitive index
of social changes, and what is more, of changes
still in the process of growth, still without
definitive shape and not as yet accommodated into
already regularized and fully defined ideological
s ys t ems. (19)
We speak to understand; we do not understand all that
we say. What Volosinov points to are the ends of both.
Those ends, he knows, are difficult but not inexplicable.
What he says of language he maintains of all human
relations:
Each word, as we know, is a little arena for the
clash and criss-crossing of differently oriented
social accents. A word in the mouth of a
particular individual person is a product of the
living interaction of social forces. (41)
Words and anything else that people notice (meaning-
fully) that "enters the social purview of the group," comes
from one place. The sign
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must be associated with the vital socioeconomic
pre-requisites of the particular group's
existence; it must somehow, even if only
obliquely, make contact with the bases of the
group's material life. (22)
On the basis of this, Volosinov's early assertion as
to the solution of the generation of meaning will not come
from looking at icons or appealing to subjective mysteries
or individual psyches. Indeed, those postulates themselves
will never be understood "until the problem of ideology is
solved" (31). In the meantime, the agitated, exploited
character of the exchange of words cannot be subverted;
exchanges occur in millieus that admit many purposes, and
any number of them can be reductive and deprecatory.
Said generally, language changes or emerges not via
attention to language but according to the purposes of
people in social relationships with each other (67). Where
there is inequity in those relationships, there is inequity
in language, and it is there for all the world to
understand because it is on the outside. Volosinov:
The very same thing that makes the ideological
sign vital and mutable is . . . that which makes
it a refracting and distorting medium. The
ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, an
eternal character to the ideological sign, to
extinguish or drive inward the struggle between
social value judgments which occur in it, to make
the sign uniaccentual. (23)
Thus, the tension of shifting economies, shifting accents.
The caveats to Volosinov are few and brief. The first
is his hyper-focus on language as the finest medium of
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human communication. He is characteristically clear about
this, calling the word "the purest and most sensitive
medium of social intercourse" (14); "we do not see or feel
an experience— we understand it" (36). One cannot help but
take issue with such blanket deletion of non-1inguistic
life or such a rigorous dichotomy between symbol and
silence. Certainly the language that we speak and read and
write makes up much of our lives, but is it all? Probably
not.
T h e s e c o n d r e s e r v a t i o n i s c l o s e l y a l l i e d ; i t c o n c e r n s
n o t s o m u ch w h a t V o l o s i n o v s a y s b u t t h e i m p l i c a t i o n s o f i t .
V o l o s i n o v v a l u e s l a n g u a g e s o h i g h l y t h a t h e s e e s t h o s e w ho
do not use words as lacking consciousness. He says,
it is the word that constitutes the foundation,
the skeleton of inner life. Were it to be
deprived of the word, the psyche would shrink to
an extreme degree; deprived of all other
expressive activities, it would die out
altogether. (29)
F o r V o l o s i n o v , t h e p s y c h e _is_ t h e i n n e r w o r d , w i t h a t t e n d a n t
c o m p l e x i t i e s a n d p o s s i b i l i t i e s , a b o v e a l l s o c i a l * No w o r d
is no psyche.
Despite these reservations, we can appreciate
Volosinov's major accomplishment, his understanding of what
is manifest by knowing and his challenge to the ideology
that sees consciousness as separate from social context.
In Existentialism and Human Emotion, Jean-Paul Sartre
explains that antisocial ideology. "What people would
173
like," he says, "is that a coward or a hero be born that
way" (34). Against that ideology, Volosinov works
feverishly. The new psychology, the new linguistics, the
new biology (genetics) collude, in his view, to dehumanize
members of society. They do it by privatizing the mind
such that people are held entirely responsible for their
actions or are entirely subjected to them, in either case
entirely controllable by more powerful sources as a matter
of necessity. Volosinov's counter-position of a dialectic
between psyche and ideology, "a continuous dialectical
interplay," ensures mutual obliteration as each becomes
comprehensible (39). Volosinov's greatest claim is that
the psyche is never alone or singly formed; this is also
the claim that reduces ideology to action and action to
persons.
The answer to the questions of dilineated humanity can
be thus described: lives are defined by language if
language is recognized as a tool of oppression. Language
is the tool par excellence. What Volosinov knew of
language is surely true of literacy: the society which
fixes the worth of speakers fixes the worth of their words,
also. A good example comes from the work of Pierre
Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. What they say of
general communication is true of literate relations. Of
the power of the school to enforce its limits on what can
be said, they conclude,
174
The mere fact of transmitting a message within a
relation of pedagogic communication implies and
imposes a social definition . . . of what merits
transmission, the code in which the message is to
be transmitted, the persons entitled to transmit
it, or, better, impose its reception, the persons
worthy of receiving it and consequently obliged
to receive it, and, finally, the mode of
imposition and inculcation of the method which
confers on the information transmitted its
legitimacy and thereby its full meaning. (109)
Paul Willis elaborates the inculcation of limits by
showing that students often participate in it. In his
description of working class boys in a British middle
school, he says that "people live, not borrow, their class
destiny . . . when what is given is re-formed,
strengthened, and applied to new purposes" (2). (One need
only note the word destiny to discern Willis' stance.)
If, as Sartre said on another occasion, hell is other
people, then literacy is hell. One simply cannot ignore
the fact of hellish literacy in numbers of lives, not those
necessarily completely deprived of it (of which there are
relatively few in Western countries) but those kept under
funded by the forces of literate enterprise. We are thus
thrown back onto the society to understand how literacy
elaborates social relations. We can see that a theory of
literacy must arise from the situations that call it forth.
That those situations often do violence to the lives and
opportunities of groups of people should be clear. The
history of voting rights is evidence enough of that.
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Another kind of literacy violence is explored by Mark
Poster, who is most concerned with the possibilities of
surveillance permitted by our computerized ability to
collect vast amounts of data. More than this, these forms
of collection, and storage, seem to occur in spite of usual
forms of communication and unimpeded by them:
Face to face interactions with oral exchanges of
symbols, supplemented by written communications,
have diminished in the texture of social life.
In their place, a variety of communication
patterns have come into existence. These may be
enumerated and analyzed according to their
progressive dissimilarity to older types.
(Foucault 164-5)
Poster means that enormous amounts of information can
be collected about individual people, groups, businesses—
in ways and with capacities inhuman, or, perhaps, extra
human. He calls this information "dead knowledge"
(Foucault 166); he understands that machines "talk" to each
other. Yet "dead knowledge," like a machine, stands
against a worker’s capacity to perform; when the worker
burns out, the worker is replaced. "Which is the subject,"
Poster asks, "computer or individual?" (Foucault 167)
Poster's yardstick of dissimilarity between old and
new types of communication is most useful. It is an
analogy we can make to the current stage of literacy; the
old kind appears on the way out. The dealings that people
have with each other in the workplace change, too: "Labor
now takes the form of men and women acting on other men and
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women, or, more significantly, people acting on information
and information acting on people" (Foucault 53).
The point we might wish to make here, however, recalls
earlier divisions of labor remarked by the
Lynds— in a capitalist economy, people have always acted on
each other. Now, contrary to Poster's guess, these
relations are simply more open to view; indeed, an
"information machine” may cement old relations rather than
bulldoze them. What disturbs Poster more than this,
perhaps, is that those who control now have more access to
do so. These data gathering machines monitor welfare
payments, medicare payments, criminality, credit, etc.
Never before in our history have we had at our disposal the
means to economize people and opportunities as we do now.
A book, a text, a school literacy assignment, a word-
processing job in which an operator inputs information all
day are all circumstances fraught with the historical
displacement of literacy. Who gives the assignment, about
what subjects and to what ends— these questions inhabit the
situations which literacy inhabits. The situations are
themselves sets of relationships; literacy, at most, can
only regulate relationships. This cannot be said too
strongly. The ways of literacy are reproductive of the
material relationships of people, not the psyches of
people. When and if literacy affects the psyche, the
effect is fleeting, both in an historical and developmental
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sense. Literacy is not a religious conversion. Indeed, if
the moment of literacy produces some sort of psychical
change, the change can only be viewed through the looking
glass of literacy, once the society itself is literate.
The ten year old who reads at a second grade level is
really a child who has been denounced.
Literacy, like communication, is a matter of access, a
matter of opportunity, a matter of economic security— a
total matter. The violence of literacy is the violence of
the milieu it comes from, promises, recapitulates. It is
attached inextricably to the world of food, shelter, and
human equality. When literacy harbors violence, the
society harbors violence.
To elucidate the violence of literacy is to understand
the distance it forces between people and the possibilities
for their lives. To see this is to see how daily work
proceeds, one worker related to another, axes of literacy
drawing structures of alienation. It is precisely the
social dimension that is denied by many literacy theorists.
Even those who go beyond the superficialities of literacy
seem to deny what they know to be true. Jay L. Robinson,
for example, hesitates not at all to label English teachers
the harbingers of American literacy, "mandarins of print
culture" ("What is Literacy" 3). At the same time he
advocates mechanisms of literacy that not only spur
mandarinism but exonerate it. Of the literacy testing of
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students, for example, for whom the results mean "economic
if not physical survival," Robinson says.
To base entrance and licensure examinations on
literacy is both inevitable and legitimate, for
ours is a society that requires facility with the
written word in almost all of its workaday
activities. ("What is Literacy" 2)
Americans, Robinson implies, are just born literate by
nationality. Who would change a nation? (Who would change
entry requirements?)
Of course, elsewhere Robinson says that the aim of
writing programs should be to help students "to develop as
ethnographers of thought ("Literacy in the Dept, of
English" 492). He speaks bluntly and correctly of
teachers' "own separately lived lives and our all-too-often
separate social identities, our ways of being in a world
that we did not necessarily choose" ("Literacy in the Dept,
of English" 492). But Robinson needs, also, to speak so
clearly of the worth of those long untaught. He needs to
say that our work is not to teach people the ways of
literacy that already distance them from the ways of
equality but to teach them to change the ways, to teach
them to revise the society that impoverished and denied
them from the beginning. (Robinson also must mention the
teaching due students unaffected by discrimination.)
Robinson may be correct when he predicts that some
current mandarins of print will lose out to the
"electronification of the word" and more will have to learn
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new ways to "hold onto that power" ("What is Literacy" 3).
But, do we really think that the introduction of computers
and word processors into classrooms (especially "English"
classrooms) and businesses will introduce new opportunities
for those previously denied opportunity? Will the long
disfranchised suddenly be transformed into the computer
literate, and will the teachers who for so long ensured the
success of certain groups of students at the expense of
others reverse the process?
T h e r e i s n o r e a s o n t o e x p e c t t h i s . I s t h i s r e a s o n t o
a b a n d o n l i t e r a c y ?
There is reason for despair as we view much of the
current literacy scholarship, but that is not to say that
literacy should be abandoned. What we need to abandon are
literacy practices that make unnatural and unfair the lives
of human beings. Certainly, literacy signifies profound
human communication. Yet literacy itself has nothing to
say. What we must develop is an agenda for fair things to
say and fair places to say them. These places are
everywhere in our lives; they are especially in school
where many of our lives are spent. In schools and in other
literacy programs, we can foster a literacy that fosters
change.
To d o t h i s , we m u s t r e m e m b e r w ho we r e a l l y a r e . We
a r e n o t p r i v a t e i n d i v i d u a l s i n w h o s e p r i v a t e m i n d s t h e
p r i n t e d w o r d w o r k s p o w e r f u l d e e d s . We a r e , t o b e s u r e ,
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natural individuals, but we are social before we are born,
and the commerce we do with literacy is always,
fundamentally, social. We are arranged by our relations to
literacy, to how and why literacy is produced and to the
effects of what literacy is about. The extension of these
relations is a ratio of survival and it describes how close
to the edge our social lives are lived.
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IV: Programs
W hat t o d o . W hat t o d o .
This was the question and the statement made over and
over again by June Jordan of Hunter College in her speech,
"Problems of Language in a Democratic State," to the 1982
National Council of Teachers of English convention. What
to do, what to do about English education, an education
Jordan said closed down opportunities for minorities and
untraditional students, an education that narrowed rather
than opened the possibilities of social meaning and social
action. What to do Jordan proposed was to explode the
curriculum and content of English courses, to include and
embrace the outside world in the subject of English, and to
bring the broad offerings of an English activism to all
courses throughout the educational system. This is what to
do, she said, to create a fairer and better society in
which a fairer and better English curriculum plays a major
part.
I n t h e a d d r e s s i m m e d i a t e l y f o l l o w i n g J o r d a n , W i l l i a m
I r m s c h e r , t h e i n c o m i n g P r e s i d e n t o f t h e NCTE, r e c o m m e n d e d
t h a t E n g l i s h t e a c h e r s s t a y i n s i d e E n g l i s h c l a s s r o o m s a n d
c o n f i n e s w h e r e t h e y b e l o n g . I r m s c h e r d i d n o t s a y t h a t
E n g l i s h t e a c h e r s s h o u l d k e e p t h e i r n o s e s c l e a n a n d o u t o f
t h e s t r e e t s , b u t h e c a m e c l o s e . I f we " p o l i t i c i z e t h i s
[NCTE] o r g a n i z a t i o n b e y o n d i t s e d u c a t i o n a l p u r p o s e s , we
182
will polarize the membership" (54). If the organization
confronts issues of "apartheid in South Africa, abortion
and nuclear freeze" the organization threatens the
"substance of English studies" (55-56). "If we are linked
to almost everything, where do we terminate our chain of
active concerns" (55)? June Jordan had given him an answer
moments before. We do not draw lines, she had said; we do
not terminate. The answer was flatly rejected, the
"integrity of the profession" preserved (55-57). That
moment at the NCTE was, to say the least, interesting. It
certainly poses the issues before us in literacy education.
Literacy programs in the United States encompass a
range of social categories. Hunter and Harman, authors of
Adult Literacy in the United States, count 10,000 ad hoc
adult literacy programs in the country in addition to
sizable adult literacy programs sponsored and funded by the
federal government, volunteer organizations, and American
enterprise. These efforts include pre-school projects,
remedial programs for non-adult populations, prison
literacy programs, commercial re-training efforts, military
literacy training, second language literacy, and, of
course, the usual public and private school literacy
educations that persist from kindergarten through high
school, community and junior colleges, four year colleges
and universities, and graduate institutions. Whereas the
current chapter will attempt to keep in mind the full range
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of literacy education in the country, it will focus on
programs that succeed. As will become evident, if it has
not already, the one feature that characterizes most
literacy efforts is failure. (An exception to this might
be the sort of tested literacy success rates in early years
in public schools, but there the failure is surprisingly
high and group-specific; also, these success rates do not
acknowledge the narrowness of the particular literacy
training or the basis on which the training proceeds.)
Earlier chapters have suggested ideological and theoretical
assumptions that predict programmatic failure. Thus, the
need to delineate the assumptions of alternative, promising
programs, as well as their processes, is critical. Here,
the assumption about good programs is that they go forward
based on the demands of those who would be literate but
that the origin and purposes of those demands require
thorough and continuing examination. To assume this, of
course, is to establish a beginning for investigation, not
an end.
Failed literacy programs spring from an inability to
see what they are about. Three categorical areas of
programmatic concern reveal the irregularities of a
national literacy mind-set gone awry— or, as it were,
maintained just so. These are areas of description,
implementation, and philosophies. No one area of concern
appears to outweigh the other; together they virtually
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assure breakdown, if not negligence.
All programs serve a populace. Demographic
descriptions of that populace are crucial. But, according
to major literacy studies, the numbers of illiterates are
indeterminate. Hunter and Harman place the range "from 23
million or 65 million" (ix). Frank Gaik summarizes rate
quotes from several sources agreeing that at least 46
million Americans cannot perform "basic literacy tasks as
citizens and consumers" (3). Johnathan Kozol, in his
newest literacy publication, Illiterate America, says that
57 million . . . can't fulfill basic tasks," and he cites
another researcher who claims that 75-78 million "can't
read well enough to function" (9). In any event, Kozol
claims that one in three adult Americans is illiterate. An
adult illiterate is anyone 16 years and over who has
dropped out of high school; this description is accepted by
most researchers.
Likewise, there are the discrepancies between people
targeted for service by literacy groups and those who are
served. The Adult Basic Education agency targets 70
million and enrolls 20 million. Of those, in 1981, 8.9%
earned the General Equivalency Diploma (GED), 2.4% earned a
diploma equivalency, and 50% dropped out (Gaik 9). Hunter
and Harman cite similar statistics, adding that in 1976
only 9% of the enrollees in Adult Basic Education (ABE)
programs earned 8th grade certificates (67). Laubach
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Volunteers and the Literacy Volunteers of America (LVA)
serve 70,000 a year of Kozol's 60 to 70 million (Kozol 41-
43) .
Gaps in pedagogical initiatives to eradicate literacy
compound the confusion. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan
declared a Literacy Day (Hunter and Harman ix). The Right
to Read program, begun in the early seventies, declared
itself able to wipe out literacy in ten years (Hunter and
Harman 71). Johnathan Kozol, in the mid eighties advocates
a mobilization of illiterates and planned escalations
across numbers of years for a widening theatre of literacy
(121). Hunter and Harman call for a national imperative
that puts literacy in the forefront of annual political
issues (71-72).
Particular pedagogies range from what Gaik calls the
Protestant Literacy Ethic, a step by step accumulation of
incremental skills aimed at higher insights, to phonics, to
Laubach written and produced streamlined self-paced
workbooks, to mixed media approaches which employ citizens
from within affected communities rather than from without.
On this point, we must recognize that literacy efforts
undertaken under most auspices proceed according to
sequential pedagogies. The line that divides programs is
less pedagogic than it is motive: some programs work to
enrich the lives of illiterates and some programs work to
enrich job competency. Proponents of each motive perceive
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major discrepancies in their purposes.
Finally, illiteracy is presumed to have philosophical,
or quasi-psychological, connections with all manner of
other social malfunctions. Jonathan Kozol, for example,
notes that prison populations have the highest
concentrations of adult illiterates in the country (13),
and Hunter and Harman, despite questioning some alleged
connections between illiteracy and social illness (9),
print table after table of the numbers of high school
dropouts, people on welfare, prisoners, people who fail to
achieve an 8th grade reading score, the weekly earnings of
blacks and whites, and unemployment and 'hard-core'
unemployment. Illiteracy is not a cause, Hunter and Harman
say, and they cannot find the correlation, yet they cannot
resist the urge to suggest. The preponderance of such
abysmal statistics requires an explanation, and a
predisposition to illiteracy appears to go hand in hand
with most social trespasses against the literate members of
society.
The intelligence gathering on illiterates is at best
confusing. Hunter and Harman report that out of a total of
5,269,699 adults in South and North Carolina, 2,758,356
have dropped out of school— over 50% in both states (38).
Are they illiterate? Are they unemployed? How are they
employed? The State (Columbia, SC) newspaper says that
"nearly 400,000 South Carolinians 25 and older . . . never
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went to high school" ("Twenty Percent of Adults" C2). Does
this mean that the 52.5% of adult South Carolinians, a
total of 916,775, who did not complete high school are
joined by 400,000 adults who never went to high school to
compose a group of 1,316,775 possible illiterates? The
adult population of South Carolina in 1976 was 1,745,829.
That leaves 429,054 other people in the state. Are the
people who never attended high school included in the
statistics of the people who never completed high school?
Are the high school graduates literate? Who is the truant
officer? The questions are not just statistical, and the
raft of remedial actions, coupled with the bogus
correlations, merely serves to bury the meaning of literacy
in America.
T h e i s s u e s a r e t r i c k y , b u t w h a t we m u s t a s k i s t h i s :
w h a t d o e s i t m e a n t o t a l k a b o u t g a p s i n n u m b e r s o f p e o p l e
t h a t a r e i n t h e t e n s o f m i l l i o n s ? A r e t h e r e n o
c o n s e q u e n c e s o f i l l i t e r a c y t h a t w o u l d m i t i g a t e a g a i n s t s u c h
i n c h o a t e d a t a ? W h e r e e l s e o r i n w h a t o t h e r e n d e a v o r s a r e
s u c h d i s c r e p a n c i e s a c c e p t a b l e ? M ore o m i n o u s , h ow c a n
s u c c e s s f u l l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s p r o c e e d o n t h e b a s i s o f a n
i n d e t e r m i n a t e c l i e n t e l e ? O n l y a m i n u t e s e g m e n t o f t h e
" t a r g e t " c l i e n t e l e i s r e a c h e d p e r y e a r ( H u n t e r a n d H arm an
8 ) ; y e t t h i s g a p i s v i e w e d l a r g e l y w i t h q u i e t a c q u i e s c e n c e .
W i t h i n t h e f r a m e w o r k a d v a n c e d i n t h e p r e v i o u s t h r e e
c h a p t e r s , s u c h e v i d e n c e c a n b e v i e w e d a s a n o t h e r i n s t a n c e
188
of the violence of literacy. Kozol calls the 1 in 3
illiterate adult Americans invisible; Joe McCarthy
suspected Communists under his bed. The comparison is
cheeky, perhaps, but the "invisible minority" of
illiterates is a McCarthian phenomenon precisely because it
is not the issue. Who an illiterate _is is less important
than why "countless" people are judged so and how their
amorphous condition excludes them from literate society.
Most illiterates simply have no use for their literacy.
The illiterates who possess the least literacy are only the
clearest examples.
To find ways to create and improve programs of
literacy in this country we must ask what illiteracy really
looks like and ask how it came to be that no one appears to
know. Some, like James Moffett, are kind on the latter
issue. Illiteracy got to be a problem, he thinks, because
teachers live in a "frenetic world they never made" but in
which "they must try to create conditions of literacy"
(40). Others, like Johnathan Kozol, implicate powerful
concerns of the country. Of the current situation he says,
"Illiteracy in any land as well-informed and wealthy as the
U.S.A. in 1985 is not an error. It is not an accident"
(89). The issue of illiteracy, he concludes, is
fundamentally political for it is bound up in the social
welfare of American citizens, especially the poor. He
adds:
189
When the government itself has been elected by
exclusion of one third of the electorate, when
the third which is excluded is the third which
also gets the most deficient nutriment, least
adequate health care, poorest housing, and which
has an infant death rate twice that of the
middleclass, and when that government— having
arrived in power— has actively engaged in the
reduction of all services and funds which might
at least alleviate the pain if not the cause of
so much needless subjugation, who can still
adhere to the belief that this [issue] is not
political? (92)
On this point, Kozol is right. Yet, like Hunter and
Harman, Kozol must still address larger social mechanisms
of disfranchisement. The programs that Kozol and Hunter
and Harman propose barely graze the deep pathologies of a
country touting literacy as the way out of poverty. What
these scholars need is less incredulity at the apparent
willingness of a citizenry to not care about the destitute
and powerless among them than a reasoned sense of what
Robert Heilbronner calls "a social order that manifests its
historic trajectory because it is in the thrall of specific
forces or determinative agencies" (18). Kozol et al.,
might ask how systematic failure of literacy programs
matters to the systematic success of a capitalist economy.
A brief look at the kinds of failures experienced by these
programs provides evidence enough.
The inability to reach or "improve" the education of
target populations, as already mentioned, is a clear
example of structural blockage. Yet, as Hunter and Harman
190
point out, the largest governmental educational program
functions as a conduit for money rather than "as leaders in
adult basic educational practice" (64). To wit, the
government funds programs which it already sanctions,
especially if there appears little need to create programs
for alternative results.
Reaching people is by no means a metaphor in many of
these programs. Gaik, Hunter and Harman, and Kozol
describe the inability of literacy efforts to accommodate
the basic realities of the lives of the clientele.
Programs are located outside of target communities, there
is little or no childcare, the literacy volunteers tend to
be older white females from socio-economic strata far
removed from the people soliciting education, and so forth.
Volunteerism is itself a problem, as Gaik points out.
Laubach and the Literacy Volunteers of America recruit
teachers on a strictly voluntary basis, yet to do so is to
trivialize the need for the programs and to blame
volunteers for lacking a professionalism they do not
possess and for perpetuating an entrenched problem they are
not equipped to solve (7-8).
The rhetoric of literacy efforts matches the practical
operations. The Laubach program, for example, presumes an
almost child-parent relationship between illiterates and
tutors. The founding slogan of the programs is "Each one
teach one," and it hinges on the idea that teachers can
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give any knowledge because the source of knowledge is
inexhaustible. At the same time, for Laubach, illiterates
are folks who need help and consumer counseling: "That's
what it's all about. Not only teach [illiterates] to read,
but also help them to help themselves up" (qtd. in Gaik 6).
The process in the Laubach system is grinding,
however. Students work through series of workbooks,
graduating from level to level until an acceptable reading
and comprehension score has been attained. Whereas the Vai
illiterate requires three or four days to become literate,
and many American six and seven year olds conquer literacy
in a few weeks or months, Laubach assumes that the task
takes years. A Laubach volunteer in a program in a small
town in the South summarizes the process as she recounts
her experience with a 35 year old textile worker: "We're
right on target. It's our 10th session and we're working
on our 10th lesson" (Higgins: 1).
At the end of the Laubach program, the organization
presents certificates of completion to those who master
each workbook at each level of difficulty.
In contrast to the Laubach pedagogy, newer
governmental initiatives call for speed. Ronald Reagan's
sympathies for illiterates are not that different from
Laubach, of course; Reagan speaks to the need to "enlarge
the potential of every American life" in order to "renew
our economy and protect our freedom" (qtd. in Gaik 3).
192
But, these imperatives demand high visibility. According
to a 1983 literacy campaign, they must
emphasize immediate and high-impact payoffs.
Given the short periods of time, the relatively
small resources, the salience of the problem [of
illiteracy], and the timeliness of the issue, the
NALP [National Adult Literacy Project] should
focus on high visibility, high impact, short
time-frame goals . . . outcomes and the factors
and policies that affect these outcomes. (qtd.
in Gaik 23)
The framers of the National Adult Literacy Project narrow
the goals of the program accordingly: "Restrict the scope
of the project . . . to programs . . . which have as their
central goal the improvement of functional literacy for a
productive workforce" (qtd. in Gaik 23).
Illiterates, in other words, not only need friends but
fast access to the economic opportunities to literacy. A
recently begun program in the prison system of West
Virginia provides an extreme example. "No read, no
release" suggests an indefinite incarceration until the
inmate "buys" himself out of prison with an ostensibly
marketable reading level (Marcus).
Of course, if literacy and economic well-being went
hand in hand, there would be less quarrel with calls for
friendship, quick action for remediation, and visible
payoff. The truth is, however, that literates and
illiterates inhabit separate marketplaces, separate
networks, separate communities. This fact undercuts the
economic motivation for literacy programs. President
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Reagan may claim that "as a nation, we too pay a price" for
illiteracy (qtd. in Gaik 2), and Johnathan Kozol may
foretell the calamities of not making illiterates literate:
We are all held hostage to each other in this
nation. There are no citizens, no matter how
wealthy, no matter how removed they may believe
themselves to be, who will not be forced to pay a
formidable price. (21)
Yet whereas Kozol may have identified a hostage profile in
America, hostage status is hardly something that most
literates feel toward their illiterate compatriots,
compatriots located across town in the invisible spaces
that Kozol describes. Kozol links the costs of welfare,
illegitimacy, imprisonment, unemployment with the costs of
illiteracy, but if history is any indication, especially
current history, the majority American response is neither
to underwrite the expense nor eradicate the causes. The
usual response, as Kozol admits, is to cut social funding
when social privilege is at stake.
To summarize, Kozol, Hunter and Harman, Moffett and
others have lost sight of the way in which human life and
human community are involved with prevailing economic
systems, indeed, within contexts of social economy that
reduce perameters of life. Kozol, for example, can talk of
the white collar business man who hides his illiteracy by
carrying with him a copy of the New York Times from office
to restaurant to home, but such a man is hardly subject to
the economic injustice done those who read newspapers quite
194
well but rarely read of themselves or find their
communities integrated into the reported business of
mainstream, middle class, business or corporate America.
"Invisibility” is certainly less a tag than a history.
Such is the conceptual arena in which literacy programs
will go forward should they function within a society that
finally trades literacy for equality.
Statements to this effect are made. William Labov, in
his 1960's studies of black male youths in ghettos in New
York City, said pronouncedly that language learning between
adults and children must go on according to knowledge, not
rote expectation— on either part. If a city teacher is to
deal with a ghetto child
it means that the social situation is the most
powerful determinant of verbal behavior and that
an adult must enter into the right social
relation with a child if he wants to find out
what a child can do. (Language 212)
Labov concludes, "This is just what many teachers cannot
do" (212).
Teachers and social researchers in England have known
the same for quite a while. The language of lower-class
students, students already deemed throwaways in an
industrially deteriorating society, does not find
acceptance in schools, and the juxstaposition of languages
does not produce learning. Michael Torbe and Peter Medway
bucked the system in a working class English high school in
the mid-1970's but to do so they had to create their own
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criteria and practices of classroom literacy. Torbe and
Medway strongly believed that as teachers they could
influence their students' awareness of the politics and
maneuverability of language; but, they say,
we cannot kit them out with a complete new
language and style of behaviour as they come in
through the classroom door. Our interest as
teachers is in further learning, not in producing
speakers who are more respectably turned out.
The language for learning must be in the first
place the speakers own familiar language; after
all, we are asking it to perform the function of
thinking, and it will need to come as easily and
naturally as thought; that is why it needs to be
the language which the students wear as close to
them as their skins. (42)
Torbe and Medway concern themselves with the reasons for
literacy; such concerns far supercede the ignorance, if not
the mendacity, of programs dedicated to step-by-step
literacy conversion.
That argument, of course, amounts to nothing more than
the technical debate over the manner of cognitive
comprehension of words and phrases: coding and decoding.
Phonics, Secretary of Education William Bennett has
recently decided, is the best way to teach reading in the
schools; sight reading is out of favor. Bennett speaks as
though the debate were new; indeed, he never understands
the debate is the issue. Bennett's recent booklet of
teaching tips only strengthens the view to his reactionism
(Connell). Clifford Geertz once again cuts through the
political idiom to recall the inextricable purposes of
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using language and of teaching it— to promote the abilities
of human beings to read the world for information. As he
says, what we want to know when we see a text of any sort
(and by text Geertz does not mean print) is to understand
how
the inscription of action is brought about, what ;
its vehicles are and how they work, and on what
the fixation of meaning from the flow of events—
history from what happened, thought from
thinking, culture from behavior— implies for
sociological interpretation. (31)
In other words, reading is finding out how history came to
be and deciding what to do about it. This is what good
literacy programs should be about, also.
It should be no mystery, however, that many literacy
programs outside of the schools merely reproduce the
failures inside the schools. Labeling sixteen year olds
who drop out of school adult illiterates does not eradicate
their illiteracy in classrooms. The schools are clearly
the place where the changes in literacy education would
have the broadest impact; yet few school efforts appear
prepared to redress current destruction. Calls for
improvements in education by documents such as The Nation
at Risk (U.S. Dept, of Education) and Involvement in
Learning: Realizing the Potential of Higher Education
(National Institute of Education), demand exactly the kinds
t
of programs that will assure a healthy illiteracy rate. j
Because the task forces of educators who prepared these j
197
documents fear that the United States will lag behind in
production, defense, and consumerism, they advocate more
homework, seven hour school days, enforcement of rules by
non-teachers, and private payment for education (U.S. Dept,
of Education 29). According to the educators responsible
for improving higher education, remediation should be
normed "in no case . . . at less than twelfth grade levels"
(NIE 48). Pedagogical recommendations replicate the step-
by-step methodology already described as the sequential
approach to protestant doctrine: the lowest skill leads to
the highest.
How d o we c r e a t e a s o c i e t y t h a t d e m a n d s o t h e r g o a l s
and embraces fairer values? Mina Shaughnessy, in perhaps
the first significant study of the needs of a-literate,
non-traditional college students, speaks with sympathy of
those educators who would re-organize their literacy
teaching to ignore non-standard, "errored" features of
writing. She said,
When one considers the damage that has been done
to students in the name of correct writing, this
effort to redefine error so as to exclude most of
the forms that give students trouble in school
and to assert the legitimacy of other kinds of
English is understandable.
. . . (9)
And Shaughnessy goes on to acknowledge that the notion of
error is "more complex than it seems in theory" (11). But
Shaughnessy does not trust the world to allow a
reorganization of standards. "In a better world," she
198
says, "it is true readers might be more generous with their
energies . . . but it would be foolhardy to bank on that
kind of persistence except perhaps in English teachers or
good friends" (12). Thus, Shaughnessy abandons the larger
political ramifications of the failure to ask why only
"good friends" can be counted on to attend to meaning
especially since the friends of the students with whom she
dealt were themselves powerless to change the "standards"
of the society. Shaughnessy also is generous with English
teachers; the English tradition is hardly radical.
Unfortunately, Shaughnessy's route is the route
followed too by Kozol, Hunter and Harman, Moffett and
others. These scholars make many excellent proposals for
the reorganization of literacy education in this society
while ignoring the need to reorganize the society.
Kozol is perhaps the most idealistic of the advocates
for community action for literacy. Many of his ideas are
closely allied with Paulo Freire, and though the
differences are many between the situations of Brazilian
peasants and the inner-city youths of Kozol's acquaintance,
Kozol does not allow these differences to be intrusive. As
Kozol says, "Literacy by definition is shared knowledge"
(109). The question for Kozol is how to share and his
outlines for distribution of knowledge attempt to employ
and deploy all of the resources of the community at hand:
My own belief that the ideal place to teach
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illiterate adults to read and write is in the
neighborhoods in which they are condemned to
live, within which they can see the walls that
have contained them, and in which they can find
easy access to the friends and neighbors who are
best equipped to give them help. (119)
Kozol believes that literacy workers should be members
of the communities that require literacy work; these are
grassroots members of "already existing [community] groups"
(106). He also looks to the elderly, college students,and
high school students to constitute a work force to create
"circles of learners" within neighborhood centers. The
effort proceeds in stages. The first two stages of
mobilization address some 30 million of "those who are most
oppressed, the less-than-functional and those who cannot
read at all" (125). After these people, Kozol targets the
needs of another 30 million who possess a more functional
literacy. In terms of pedagogy, he likes the Hooked-on-
Books approach, a young-prisoner program started by Daniel
Fader in the late sixties to make paper back books
available in quantity to marginal readers; Kozol also
favors oral histories as ways for community members to
begin to objectify their own historical significance.
James Moffett in proposals advanced ten years earlier
also advocates involving the school with community efforts
in "a model of public schooling based on the incorporation
of school sites and educators into a community-wide network
for sharing all locally available human and material
200
r e s o u r c e s " ( A p p e n d i x ) . H e , l i k e K o z o l , b e l i e v e s t h a t
community members who can read and write should be those
who teach others in the same community with whatever
reading content and format are desired. But, unlike Kozol,
a n d H u n t e r a n d H a r m a n , w h o s e p r o p o s a l s we w i l l t u r n t o
next, Moffett does not recommend the segregation of the
'remedial' learner from other people involved in becoming
literate at any phase:
It may be that initial and 'remedial' learners
needn't be segregated by time and site, since any
activity or material could be available for mixed
groups, which will not be taught as classes but
merely share the same area and resources and each
other. (184)
Moffett is concerned, too, not merely with the isolation of
community from schools but isolation of schools from
schools and teachers from within them.
H u n t e r a n d H arm an p r e s e n t t h e m o s t c o m p l e x p i c t u r e o f
literacy advocacy. Their original study came out in 1979
to which was added a long preface in a 1985 reissue. They
recommend a community based response to the growing
i l l i t e r a c y p r o b l e m i n A m e r i c a a n d l i n k c o m m u n i t y l i t e r a c y
work with the necessity for programs to ameliorate other
social inequities:
At the same time . . . we support programs that
increase the skills of community members to
interact with and change the mainstream culture
and its institutions. This would incorporate the
positive values of the communities and enable
their members to participate more fully in the
social and economic life of the broader society.
(105)
201
Too, Hunter and Harman recognize that much money must be
spent on support services for the most oppressed illiterate
population:
Counseling, transportation, childcare, one-to-one
recruitment, in-home service, nonprint
information, and electronic media delivery
services are essential adjuncts to programs for
the disadvantaged. (100)
The poorer the community and the greater alienation from
literacy the more money Hunter and Harman recommend.
One of the features that distinguishes Hunter and
Harman is their attempt to understand what a community is.
Whereas their emphasis remains on distinctions among
communities, they begin to break down ideas about the
psychological or psycho-economic constitution of
communities in ways that other literacy educators (with the
possible exception of Henry Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz)
do not. Of the definition of communities, Hunter and
Harman say (in the 1985 preface):
We mean considerably more than that programs take
place in a local community. After all, most
programs do. We [are] advocating a particular
approach to education that deals holistically
with the teaching/learning process in a community
context. Educators committed to this approach
stress that it is never neutral. Everything that
takes place within the process expresses
assumptions about who the learners are and who
they may become. (xiv)
Unfortunately, their recommendations include the fostering
of divided sorts of illiteracies so that certain programs
already in place, and already notorious for widespread
202
failure, stay in place, while other programs get developed
to address apparently aberrant, out-of-control needs. The
maintenance of ABE, Laubach, and LVA programs, however,
balanced off with other efforts, misses the point for
literacy programs to begin with and tends to perpetuate the
initial problem. To advocate wrong programs subverts both
the program and the groups the program is designed to
serve.
The point cannot be dismissed. Given that some people
do or have succeeded in present literacy programs, Hunter
and Harman decide that these programs should focus more
closely on their successes— "concentrate on this specific
constituency that finds more traditional patterns of
schooling congenial" (115). This constituency is described
as people who
are able to see evidence in their lives or those
around them that their situations have been
improved by obtaining credentials and skills.
Since the personal motivation and self-confidence
of these adults are strong, they can move up on
the social ladder or, at the very least, feel
better about themselves and increase their
stature in the eyes of their families and
associates. (115)
On the other hand, certain people "are so inhibited by so
many other insurmountable difficulties that both their
motivation and energy are very low or entirely absent"
(117), and for this group Hunter and Harmon recommend more
community based programs funded by a "national policy . . .
to promote this approach to adults and the communities in
203
which they live" (118). The problem is that the very
structures on which the successes of the first group are
built defeat the lives and possibilities of the groups
already "too far gone" for traditional services. Indeed,
the policies of the nation's largest literacy programs
virtually ensure the continued segregation of literates
precisely because these programs are based on an "economic
ladder" of success or a supposed modicum of restored "self
esteem" in the face of longstanding social rejection.
Successful literacy programs cannot simply be welcome mats
into mainstream, credential-prizing America.
Interestingly, Hunter and Harman make certain
admissions that come precariously close to the larger
issue. In spite of well-meaning motives, these researchers
acknowledge bias and dangerous stereotyping of groups of
the poor and groups of a-literate people. Agreeing with
others, they admit,
We simply do not know enough about [illiterates']
perceptions of their world nor do we know how
they view the value placed on education
(including literacy) by the highly literate who
make decisions about programs that will be
offered for them. (xv)
In their 1985 recommendations they suggest more of this
kind of research. They ask, with deserved discomfort for
many of us,
How do disadvantaged minority American adults
learn to live and work in the Anglo-dominated
society and, also, within their own subculture,
belong to and value both? (xix)
204
But, how, indeed, we might ask do any cultures— 'sub'
or 'superior1— value themselves and others?
Kozol and others often find themselves paralyzed by
this demarcation. They formalize inequities, which is the
right thing to do. But then they reject formal methods of
address. Instead, they appeal to real situations and a
grassroots constituency. They eschew outsiders, mobilize
against enemies, and assume the responsibility to bring
about economic changes that heretofore other groups have
failed to make. In effect, however, this plan for the
opposition asks the groups with the least amount of formal
clout as well as the most debilitated content— housing,
transportation, literacy, etc., to be captains of their own
fate. Yet these groups muster against a full-blown,
entirely bureaucratized, phenomenal world that,
unfortunately, dislikes them.
The community of literacy is less a group than a
culture; a literacy program must be an examination of
culture, not of literacy. At a time when certain kinds of
literacy can make differences in the survival of some
people's lives, those differences must be made. But we
cannot forget that while literacy- training goes forward to
ensure immediate decent human lives, it must also change
the social structures that define decency. It must also
proceed with the understanding that literacy is not the key
to the good life, or to what Richard Hoggart calls "the
205
balanced life" (104). Literacy is merely a measure of the
distance between the worker and what the worker produces
and the benefits accrued. The greater the distance, the
greater the social and economic alienation of the
illiterate. Literacy programs, in school, out of school,
and before school must look to those distances and the
social and economic causes of them. The current "rage for
literacy" in this country runs counter to this impetus, for
it is not easy to examine that which binds us.
Literacy programs such as these Kozol and Hunter and
Harman advocate must begin within the communities that
cannot support the weight of illiteracy. At the same time,
they must go outside to see what, in fact, is invisible to
them. Literacy goes on without the illiterates and for
purposes other than theirs. For a community to render
itself aware of enfranchisement, it must objectify itself
to know what it looks like and it must understand the
literate world and its social and economic motivations for
maintenance of literacy. Certainly, we do not presume that
the illiterate does not see the literate or that the poor,
the unemployed, and the laid-off do not see the stable and
employed. But, where are the literacy programs that go
beyond the appearances to reach both historical origins and
present beginnings for the illiterate?
The literacy programs of the third world, the
developing and most oppressed countries are most generally
206
known for their adherence to racial and political causes.
The politics of programs in the United States are less
unified, if we can speak of unity at all. The best we can
do in the present study is to look at a range of programs
to see what it is about them that promises radicalism, or
at least diametric swings in the awareness of people with
scant opportunities. Also, we have to realize that
programs may do more than what their originators intended;
sometimes the efforts to create avenues for learning
succeed by getting lost.
The following brief survey thus starts with a review
of some of the pedagogical work of Shirley Brice Heath,
whose politics have come under some question earlier in the
study, and proceeds through literacy programs that widen
according to constituency, activity and content. The
survey ends with a summary of the University of Southern
California/California Conservation Corps joint project
which began in 1984 and continues today.
Shirley Heath has a remarkable record for setting up
innovative programs on a number of scales. Two of the most
interesting of her projects concern work with Charlene
Thomas and Thomas' pre-schooler ("Achievement"), and her
work with a teenage classroom of males in a rural section
of the Carolinas ("Ethnohistory of Writing").
Charlene Thomas was an illiterate, teenaged, unwed
207j
mother. She eventually co-wrote with Heath the report on
the literacy progress of Thomas' young child. Thomas
wanted her child to learn ways of mainstream literacy
before entering school so that the child would not face the
obstacles that ensured Charlene's own illiteracy. With the
tape recorder, on which Charlene kept records of her
experiences with her son, and with Heath's demonstrations,
Charlene not only taught her pre-schooler to attend to
books but taught herself to read in the process. Heath's
rationale for the project emphasized the role of the parent
researcher, a decidedly unique approach to parent
participation. The research-teaching-parenting roles
between mothers and their children, particularly those in
disadvantaged circumstances, is central to Heath's vision,
a vision which revolves on the axes of research, self
selected goals, and documentation.
A second Heath-inspired program involved a population
of students whose English composition teachers in junior
and senior high schools concluded could not be taught to
write. These students, all male, had chosen "to live out
their adult lives in their 'home culture.'" That culture.
Heath reports, has almost no use for literacy— on the job
(in mills) or at home or in contact with say, unemployment
bureaus, whose mainstream officers fill out applications
for those seeking jobs ("Ethnohistory of Writing" 41).
Whereas one might very well voice concern over Heath's
208
assessment of the "choices" of these males to remain in a
society which forecloses on such choices at an increasing
speed, Heath's dedication to finding ways to teach literacy
is salient. The only place where any literacy occurred in
the boys' lives was in their social gathering places— the
pool hall, for example. There, bulletin boards posted
advertisements, messages, and announcements. This, then,
became the kind of literacy that Heath asked students to
elaborate in the classroom; in addition, Heath asked
students to talk about the kind of literacy that gave them
and their communities trouble. The result was the
clarification of documents and attempts by the students to
rewrite the "legalese" of social service agency literature.
The students also created community magazines and
videotaped programs of use to the elderly in the centers
where the youths also spent time. Heath concludes that the
students found out how language works and how to gear
language toward different audiences; within their own
lives, she says, "They made functional literacy truly
functional in the context of their own cultures"
("Ethnohistory of Writing" 43). On the other hand, Heath
admits, the students remained convinced that the "stuff
about truth" in writing is a lie which teachers and (to
generalize) others outside the immediate community
perpetuate. Heath's students may well have questioned
their own "functions" more than the literacy program
209
recognized.
The insight to be gained from Heath's community
approach is her innovation in understanding the flexibility
of roles. Parents, teachers, and students trade roles, and
many roles themselves move from "expert" to researcher to
teacher as the need and circumstances for understanding
expand. Heath also begins to take students and teachers
outside of classroom confines into the nonacademic world
where, as other projects prove, nonacademic roles shift
too.
Within schools, traditional programs are also widening
their interest in community involvement. In Cleveland,
Ohio, schools and in the York County, South Carolina,
public systems, programs enlist older students to teach
reading and writing to younger students. Whereas these
programs proceed in usual manners involving assignments and
homework, teachers say that the process of education has
been eased; a Charlotte elementary reading teacher says,
for example, "It's not going from desk to desk to get them
going. It's the sixth graders who get them going." Also,
teachers like the idea that sixth graders can begin to
understand "what teachers go through." And, the younger
children are not the only academic beneficiaries. As the
teachers say, "It helps the older students with their
reading and writing skills too" (Suchetka 5-6). The
director of the federally mandated reading program in the
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long-segregated Cleveland schools agrees that when older
students teach younger students, particularly older
students who themselves have experienced difficulty with
reading, the rewards are overwhelming, even if not borne
out by standardized test scores (Gifford).
Teachers-as-students is also the guiding principle at
the summer sessions of Bread Loaf College. There, teachers
who have taught composition most of their lives are asked
to write and to share their writing with others; an
underlying assumption is that teachers of writing rarely
write themselves. The Bread Loaf school focuses
particularly on teachers in rural communities to help
teachers begin to open up definitions of literacy,
definitions which they may have not understood before or
esteemed. A recent feature article in a South Carolina
newsmagazine devoted itself to the Coordinator of the
Program in Writing at the Bread Loaf School of English; the
Coordinator, Dixie Goswami, is both a native and rural
resident of South Carolina, and her statement about the
purpose of the college sums up the college's attitude about
literacy and literacy education: "Those who teach others to
read and write are engaged in political activity. Since we
possess power in proportion to our ability to read and
write well, those skills are a human-rights issue"
(Richardson 8). Coincidental with the article about
Goswami was a letter in another rural South Carolina
211
n e w s p a p e r f r o m a g r a d u a t e o f t h e B r e a d L o a f p r o g r a m . T he
l e t t e r d e s e r v e s l e n g t h y q u o t a t i o n . I n r e s p o n s e t o t h e
state’s move to increase pupil numbers in classrooms, the
teacher writes:
First, the 'research' which is sometimes cited as
purporting to show that class size does not
matter uses techniques borrowed from industry and
applied to human beings. Those techniques are
appropriate for measuring how many and what
quality of towels a mill can produce but are not
suitable for measuring children's learning.
Second, interaction between teacher and pupil
lies at the very heart of education. Simple
arithmetic shows that at the high school or
junior high school teachers cannot spend even two
minutes of class time with each student if there
are 35 in the classroom. In reality, he or she
won't get to every pupil every day.
. . . When the EIA [the Educational Improvement
Act instituted in South Carolina on the basis of
a penny sales tax] was in its formative stages, I
persistently called the governor's office, wrote
letters and spoke up at meetings, urging that the
crucial element of class size be included for all
districts. Yes, the state should fund it, and,
rather than moving to abolish the requirement
that districts of more than 9,000 comply, the
legislature should extend the requirement to
include ALL school districts.
Nothing less is at stake than the quality of our
children's education. (Blough)
Whereas this teacher may need to re-examine the humanity of
towel production in the mills as well as ways to conduct
classrooms less contingent on individualism, she is aware
of her own political stature; that is, she is aware that
she is political. The Bread Loaf literature asks just
this— "that teachers should themselves write and should
broaden their professional acquaintance with systematic
212
inquiry so that they can make their findings known to other
researchers and to planners of curriculum" (Program in
Writing 1). Literacy and teachers exist outside of
schools, and this is a crucial insight being fostered in
the Bread Loaf literacy program.
Hunter and Harman also take pains to notice the
unheralded but often most successful literacy programs in
the country. Many of these are ethnic projects and proceed
without much money, but Hunter and Harman say, "much can be
learned by an analysis of the origins, successes, and
failures of these and similar programs" (118). For such
programs to emerge from the backwater, however, requires
the sort of federal funding that Hunter and Harman
acknowledge is hardly forthcoming nor, as one might expect,
expresses loyalty to the goals that inspired the original
successes.
A final program examined here appears to bring
together enough features of purpose and action to suggest
widespread adoption and to promote fundamental change while
avoiding or preventing some of the problems already cited.
This program is the joint collaboration of the California
Conservation Corps (CCC) and the University of Southern
California to begin a literacy program for Corps youth.
The CCC is a California program modeled after the Civil
Conservation Corps of the Depression era. It offers job
opportunities to young people who have limited options.
213
Its promise is "Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions."
A full description of the joint USC-CCC literacy effort can
be found in the report made to the Corps by the Model
Writing Project of the University (Holzman and Connelly).
The program, of course, is not without its predecessors,
but perhaps one of its distinctions is a willingness to
confront what one British researcher calls the circumstance
of "horizontal literacy," a literacy which once acquired
meets the lie of its promise (Mackillop N. Pag.); that is,
literacy is not the bearer of freedom but of continued
domination within current circumstances. Three important
points about the program are that the program attempts to
articulate a basis for action concerning literacy, it
attempts to widen and redefine its boundaries as it
proceeds, and it attempts to constitute mechanisms of self-
perpetuating autonomy so that the program can go on despite
shifts in criteria and personnel.
The relationship between the California Conservation
Corps and the University of Southern California evolved
over several years. Its evolution acquired a set of forms,
however, which underscore not merely the need for
communities to merge but for communities to define the re-
emergence. Initially the program was fairly traditional
and dominant modes held sway. The Corps members bused
themselves from close-by centers to the Southern California
campus. For an hour each weekday morning, Corps members
214
and Southern California graduate students engaged in small
groups sessions which went forward based on the voiced
interests and perceived needs of Corps members.
The second phase of the project transferred graduate
student literacy teachers to Corps centers. For a month,
the project took place on the Corps members' turf, a center
located in extreme northern California, and literacy work
proceeded during and after the Corps' typical daily
activities— clearing streams, cutting forest trails, and
repairing roofs. Graduate students took on Corps members
roles and became students of conservation just as Corps
members attempted to regain a sense of literacy that had
either been withheld from or rejected by many of them.
A third phase of the program proceeded on the
understanding that real literacy integration into the lives
and aspirations of Corps members required the active
involvement of Corps personnel as well as the continued
interest of Corps members themselves. In the beginning, as
with the Corp members, Corps staff traveled to academic
settings. Eventually, however, a recombination of setting
and staffs occurred so that the staff of the Corps and the
staff of the University set up workshops at a central Corps
member training academy. There, staff from various centers
around the state and University of Southern California
worked together in two week sessions. Though most of the
teachers remained university students, Corps personnel also
215
undertook some of the training duties. In this instance,
too, the location of the workshops allowed staffs to
interact with and observe the recruits who would eventually
head for many of the centers where the Corps staff resided
(Leeson).
Following this phase of the program, another shift
occurred which widened the academic participation in the
literacy project. New academic locations across the state
of California made summer workshops accessible to more
Corps centers and involved new sets of graduate students
and Corps staff members. Plans currently call for
increased numbers of summer sessions with Corps members
(Rodby).
As roles within and among college and Corps students,
staff, teachers, and administrators intertwined, so did
pedagogies. The pedagogies were not themselves unique?
Hunter and Harman, for example, detail many of them in
1979, and many involve media (90-97). Community
newspapers, magazines and special-interest flyers
constitute forms of communication that successfully
demonstrate and demand community interests. Video
equipment and cameras promise similar possibilities. Yet
the interesting use of technique perhaps distinguished the
California literacy project from others. For example, in
the early project sessions, the first Corps member
newspaper began in the least powerful group of
216
communicators— the ethnic Corps members whose native or
even second language was not English. That group, which
originally balked at attempts to learn English, took on the
newspaper and became a powerful source of information for
the rest of the project. In effect, those with the least
"skills" assumed management, the management of information
and the management of their own learning. Thus, as the
group members solicited news from and about other groups,
they not only acquired English but disseminated
information. In a similar way, jumped up a few levels,
staff workshops established newspapers which not only
disseminated information among different staff members and
Corps centers but established a model whereby to integrate
literacy within Corps members lives at unique centers. In
other words, staff members used newspapers in similar ways
as Corps members, and newspapers provided academic
participants with insights into how literacy might be
instituted into work situations that they themselves had
little contact with. The making of videos worked along
similar lines; a video was not imposed but generated from
the beginning by groups of Corps members who decided on
themes, scripts, locales, and so on.
The purpose of the joint effort was stated briefly—
"to establish a culture for literacy which could continue
to grow and change on its own initiative" (Stuckey, "Del
Norte," N.pag.}. Realizations and recommendations for
217
modifications also took this general shape. The project
recognized at the end of the first year that the more
opportunity Corps members had to read and write for
functional and expressive purposes (purposes described by
James Britton ten years earlier in his work with British
school students) the more they would become aware of the
nature and the consequences of their actions. Specific
recommendations for increasing the literacy in Corps
members' lives reflected an omnibus approach to the needs
of daily social intercourse:
access to background reading in various genres,
verbal and written response to daily activities,
engagement in long range planning and
participation in wider opportunities for
interpersonal and center communication networks.
. . . (Stuckey, "The USC Literacy Spike,"
N.pag. )
Before the project, Corps members, staff, and
administration gave lip service to the value of literacy
but often did not follow through. This was the situation
the joint literacy project hoped to change and which, thus
far, appears to be changing.
The Model Literacy Project provides no panacea, but it
calls into question certain features assumed to be
necessary by other programs. First, it eliminates the need
to separate and enumerate kinds of illiterates. Those who
have not acquired mainstream literacy are assumed to be
those who have not "acquired" the right to mainstream
218
opportunities, either. Second, it advocates a pedagogy to
demystify the origins and access to these opportunities,
whereas usual pedagogies often assume the naturalness of
mainstream goals and conventions. Third, in related
fashion, it sets out to deconstruct the notion of
grassroots, a notion which suggests that social divisions
are natural or to be expected and that social action must
proceed on divided bases. In this instance, however,
neither the private institution of the University of
Southern California nor the California State-run
Conservation Corps began in powerlessness; indeed, it may
be the power each exerted on the other that created the
ground for new power sources.
As the CCC example suggests, projects which begin to
construct a model of culture have the greatest chances to
change culture. A program, however, which presumes to
model culture must understand the contradictions of
culture, also. One of those contradictions, or apparent
contradictions, is the circumstance of negation. There is
opposition to literacy and literacy programs— as there is
opposition to all forms of violence. How do programs
address people who actively reject that which rejects them;
how do literacy instructors enter a culture so as to
encourage such opposition yet work toward eradicating the
need for it? This is a difficult question, but it is worth
a brief moment to review the scholarship of Paul Willis
219
simply because these issues of self-determination and
dialectic are those he deals with within a school setting.
To b e b l u n t , W i l l i s ' s s t u d y , b a s e d o n w o r k i n g c l a s s y o u t h
i n E n g l a n d , a r g u e s t h a t c l a s s s t r u c t u r e s a r e c h o s e n t o so m e
extent by each individual who is born into a capitalist
e c o n o m y ( t h u s e d u c a t i o n a l s y s t e m ) . A s h e s a y s :
Class identity is not truly reproduced until it
has properly passed thorough the individual and
the group, until it has been recreated in the
context of what appears to be personal and
collective volition. The point at which people
live, not borrow, their class identity is when
what is given is re-formed, strengthened and
applied to new purposes. . . . Once this basic
compact with the future has been made everything
else can pass for common sense. (2)
Willis gains his insights from a group of "lads" in a low-
income high school. For our purposes apropos of literacy
programs, the issues become central to the ways literacy
can be extended that do not reproduce the extensions of the
past; at some point, people stop seeing themselves as
replicas of the images that dominators seek to erect. As
Willis says, a "process of self-induction" is guided by
"regulative state institutions" (3), but a "boy becomes a
force to be reckoned with in this world" (75). Literacy
programs must ask how to engage individuality in the face
of personal exploitation, and, as importantly, how to
encourage a collective will to fight off social repression
and economic domination in a society that devalues literacy
even as a-literates acquire it. This, after all, is the
220
real situation. Long disfranchised individuals understand
the continued stigma attached to their acquisition of
literacy and despise the idea of giving in. At the same
time, they are often forced to get out, as literacy
excludes them from the communities in which they live.
Thus, becoming literate entails a cruel paradox. The
cultural and caste polarities in post-industrial society
have degenerated into systems of sham credentialism. Those
without credentials are beholden to those who demand them,
despite the decreasing need for credentials to perform
tasks which hardly require them. The content of the
credential is thus its form, in this case, its literate
veneer. One must become literate in order to survive but
one must overhaul a society which excuses disfranchisement
on the grounds of literate attainment.
The future of equality based on the literacy of the
populace is itself a questionable idea, therefore. Jurgen
Habermas has spent a lifetime analyzing the forms of
communication that stymie social commerce, forms which he
optimistically believes begin "in the logic of undistorted
language communication" but lose their logic to a
capitalist society (17). Gregory Bateson focuses on this
"distortion" of communication, which he calls a
"transcontextual syndrome." (We might call it the literacy
dilemma.) The term "transcontextual" means both a "tangle
in the rules" and the "acquisition or cultivation of such
221
tangles" (272). There are, Bateson believes, two ways to
adjust to transcontextuality. Both can be seen in the
response and/or behavior of a-literates in literate
society, though Bateson speaks on a more abstract level.
Bateson:
F i r s t . . . s e v e r e p a i n a n d m a l a d j u s t m e n t c a n b e
i n d u c e d b y p u t t i n g a mammal i n t h e w r o n g
r e g a r d i n g i t s r u l e s f o r m a k i n g s e n s e o f a n
i m p o r t a n t r e l a t i o n s h i p w i t h a n o t h e r m am m al.
[But] second . . . if this pathology can be
warded off or resisted, the total experience can
promote creativity. (278)
In regard to literacy, unfortunately, the first consequence
outpaces the second. As much as the relationship holds
between the poor, the underfed, the imprisoned, the
unemployed and underemployed and literacy, literacy puts in
the wrong a-literate people. Literacy is violent.
As to the second consequence, the possibilities are
what we must pursue— with dispatch. Such are not abstract
possibilities— none of the subjectivity, mind-enhancing,
power-of-literacy opiates that now prevail in corporate,
educational, mainstream minds of America. To the contrary,
the possibilities must hold to the realities of daily lives
and snatch them as they emerge from and reproduce the
mechanisms of daily commerce. In "The Social Context of
Literacy Education," Michael Holzman says that "just as
every manifestation of the system of domination is in a
sense a replication of the entire system, so every human
222
interaction, insofar as it is human, presents the
possibility of human freedom" (30). Literacy programs must
pursue the human, insofar as literacy collides with human
purpose.
The collision of literacy and life occurs in the
broadest American arena, public education. In an extensive
study of American high schools in contemporary society,
Theodore Sizer writes of many schooling complexities—
populations, locales, numbers of students and teachers, and
so on. Sizer attempts to assess the current status of
secondary education particularly in response to recent
governmental assessments. Two facts about high schools
strike Sizer forcefully. In Horace's Compromise, The
Dilemma of the American High School, he observes,
as one visits communities one is gradually struck
by how similar the structure and articulated
purpose of American high schools are. Rural
schools, city schools; rich schools, poor
schools; public schools, private schools; big
schools, little schools: the framework of
grades, schedules, calendar, courses of studies,
even rituals, is astonishingly uniform and has
been so for at least forty years. . . . High
school is a kind of secular church, a place of
national rituals that mark the stages of a young
citizen's life. The value of its rites appears
to depend on national consistency. (5-6)
Sizer's logic, it seems, can be reversed. National
consistency may well depend on the rites of schools.
A second observation which Sizer makes, with some
apparent inconsistency, is that the one difference between
high schools is economic:
223
Among schools there was one important difference,
which followed from a single variable only: the
social class of the student body. . . . It got so
that I could say with some justification to
school principles, 'Tell me about the incomes of
your students' families and 1*11 describe your
school.' (6)
Sizer is probably right. His sense of history is a bit
narrow, however. Forty years of American schooling may
appear monolithic but schools begin and proceed. Schools
come from societies, societies from groups of people, and
people from each other. What happens across the gaps?
Asked a bit more archly by Heilbroner, what brings about
the universal creation of distinctions of social
prestige; the surrender of self into ceremonies
and mass activities and beliefs; the indifference
to or enjoyment of cruelties inflicted on humans
who are classified as 'others' rather than
'brothers'? . . . (21)
Heilbroner gives no facile answer but he names his book The
Nature and Logic of Capitalism because he thinks there are
such things, and answers to questions of division and
cruelty derive therefrom.
The answers suggested in this study may be less
erudite. They have the advantage, however, of not being
based on an examination of "pure minds," literate
sensibilities, or fatuous allusions to communities. These
answers may be put into perspective by considering a
quotation from Richard Lanham, again. Lanham is not a
scapegoat; he is, however, a spokesperson for literacy in
224
America as he has published widely and prolifically in
educational books and journals as well as other forums
(such as video cassettes) directed at improving the prose
of educational and corporate enterprise. He has also
headed one of the largest writing programs in public higher
education in the United States and which he recommends as a
model for other institutions. The quotation comes from
Lanham's latest book. Literacy and the Survival of
Humanism, and is found in the essay, "Post-Darwinian
Humanism." In the essay, Lanham throws his weight behind
*Sizer and repudiates Bateson. Rather than confronting the
social, especially the academic, travesty of putting people
in the wrong, Lanham believes that a formal contretemps
between good and bad humanism is the seat of all education.
Thus, (ostensibly) good humanists wage a battle rooted
underneath them, indeed a battle that may tear good
humanists in two since, as he says,
man is double. Human nature is forever tempted
by its evolving inheritance to play and to
compete. Somewhere between these two lies the
domain of purpose, a world of practicality that
we can, if we are lucky, sustain by balancing the
two powerful and opposed urges of the biogrammar.
(137)
Lanham's non-world, the unpractical domain which exists
between polarities, unfortunately, is the world described
throughout this study as the arbiter of literacy. These
non-worldly, non-practical oppositions constitute the
barriers to human equality: mind/body, individual/society,
225
oral/literate, and— if we push the argument—
gene/environment.
A straightforward way to paraphrase Lanham's and many
literacy educator's perspectives on the people of literacy
is this: some people are winners and some losers. Some,
in the late twentieth century, are born into the biogrammar
of the belle-lettre, and some are not. Demographics being
what they are, we have only to map births to outline a
fairly accurate picture of socio-economic destinies in
America. These are not the outlines of literacy, though
literacy parallels and guages them, and these are not the
outlines colored in by literacy, though literacy colors the
days and opportunities of people denied or differentiated
by literate scales. These are the outlines of benefit and
comfort and of class willingness to draw margins to ensure
not mere comfort but the terms to contain comfort. Such
are the terms Lanham and many literacy educators and
literacy programs endorse.
These terms, and their alternatives, have been what
this study has sought to point out. This study has
suggested that literacy is deeply implicated in maintaining
the myth of the classless American society and the
miserable consequences of that myth. It has suggested that
literacy is investigated in ways that benefit the
investigators and that the investigators benefit the aims
and goals of an unfair society. It has suggested that our
226
theories of literacy are little more than doctrines that
reflect Western, capitalist requirements of marketplace,
"individual" competition. It has suggested that literacy
is not liberating for numbers of people in the society and
that cultures of literacy are formed along discriminatory,
marginal paths. Finally, it has suggested that the money
we spend on the public literacy programs we devise is money
well spent on waste. Few people and few systems of
commerce change for the better as a result of public
expenditure. In sum, this study has suggested that the
future of literacy education in the United States is bleak.
This study does not advocate a bleak outlook, however.
It is not true that literacy must camoflauge the ways of
work and education in our society, and it is not true that
we, as educators, must continue to be unfair. We must
simply change the structures of our educational system as
we strive to change the socio-economic realities that
structure us. We must change those structures ajb the same
time we change education. Is this easy?
Are the amount and kinds of pain that the current
system ensures and accumulates easy?
Each one of us, in the end, has to ask how much pain
we are willing for others to endure; each of us has to
realize we are the other. When we understand the violence
of our literacy then perhaps we will understand the
redirection of human goals. When we understand that, then
227
the recognition and redress of the violence of literacy in
our schools and in our every day classes and work places
will become salient. Then, we can hope, the violence of
literacy may become our avenue for freedom from violence,
after all.
228
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