Literacy as Property

I would, at this point, reemphasize Street's point that schooling and literacy are separable and that literacy is multiple. In the current discussion, I will address literacy training and mass public education.

Catherine Prendergast draws upon critical race theory in her reading of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 to illustrate the fact that Whitness in the United States has historically been invested with value as property. She draws a connection with this idea of Whitness as property with the notion of literacy as White property in her examination of the Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (20). In the Brown decision, literacy was linked to public schooling as "the very foundation of good citizenship" (17); in the Bakke decision some two decades later, however, Prendergast argues that the Court's decision drew upon the sort of literacy crisis discourse described by John Trimbur. Public literacy education between Brown and Bakke becomes devalued in the public discourse, according to Prendergast, precisely because African-American citizens gained access to it. The value of literacy education as property becomes variable, a moving target if you will. As John Trimbur notes, the advent of a literacy crisis signals "middle-class anxieties about loss of status and downward mobility [which] have repeatedly been displaced and refigured in the realm of language practices and literary education" (280).

Elspeth Stuckey observes that "it is possible that a system of ownership built on the ownership of literacy is more violent than past systems [of oppression]" (18) and that "in contemporary capitalism in the United States...literacy and class are fused" (19). Those in possession of it use literacy to legitimate their own hegemonic power. I hasten to add that while discussions of race and class may overlap, as they do in this context, I do not wish to suggest that they are always congruous, but they are sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to untangle from one another. As Prendergast points out, a declaration of equal access to education for people of color is not the same as actually providing, in material terms, equal education (27), and these material inequities are regrettably too often associated with racial segregation. Dennis Carleson contends that the "vulgar pragmatism" of the basic skills approach to literacy schooling in inner city schools is an attempt by state and corporate elites to channel these students into low-paying positions, denying them the education they need to get higher-paying jobs. He notes that this centralized, beauracratic control of urban schools, under the guise of bootstrapping, basic-skills educational reform, really is a removal of educational control from the communities themselves, communities which often comprise disproportionate numbers of people of color. Prendergast points out, in her discussion of Cook-Gumperz, that this basic skills approach masks the inequity built into the meritocratic systems of mass schooling. Control of the commodity of literacy education, then, is often executed under the blanket ideology of Graff's literacy myth, but also in conjunction with various other uninterrogated ideological assumptions about which groups of citizens are fit to receive which forms of literacy education. Thus it is incumbent upon teachers to help their students develop a sense of agency in their own literacy practices since research shows that mere access to literacy is not quite enough; we must help them ask questions about the kinds of literacy practices they engage in, the kinds of literacy practices that will be valued by the dominante culture in their academic and civic life, and the kinds of agency they can claim for themselves.

As Street reminds us, however, it is dangerous to conflate schooling with literacy

Vincent discusses how literacy often functioned as a shared commodity in those communities in which literacy was not universal. The ability to read and write were often for sale, and literacy materials like newspapers were often shared (102).

Cressy (?): interesting counterpoint how Bibles, literacy artifacts/literal commodities, could have its use reinterpretted by those who could not read.

-- BrianHoule - 05 May 2006