Caitlin Geoghan
Professor Barbara Gleason
ENGL C0853: Adult Learners of Language
and Literacy
May 20, 2014
Review: Literacy
in American Lives
Brandt,
Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Print
In Literacy
in American Lives, Deborah Brandt explores the process by which 80
Americans, born between 1895 and 1985, acquired and utilized literacy skills
over their lifetimes. Brandt amassed
information on the literacy practices of individuals by conducting a series of
in-depth interviews, in a geographically and economically diverse area of south
central Wisconsin, in the 1990’s. Literacy in American Lives, published in
2001, presents the stories of individual learners and examines the ways in
which larger economic forces, impact their literacy experiences. Her analysis focuses largely on the
relationship between individual literacy and large-scale economic development
and the role of sponsors of literacy: social and economic forces that desire
and develop particular individual literacies and then exploit those implanted
literacies for their own gain.
Brandt argues that everyday people often go to
great lengths to acquire literacy. In
modern American society, literacy is expected and often taken for granted. Early in the 20th C, a high school
diploma was an unusual accomplishment; at present, it’s the minimal expected
educational achievement. As levels of
individual educational attainment have risen, the system that provides
education has, to use Brandt’s term, democratized. Expanding literacy in the general population
has been an “instrument for more democratic access to education, political
participation and upward mobility.” (Brandt 2) That is not to say that
increasing literacy has been without a downside. Brandt notes,
The
ability to read and, more recently, to write often helps to catapult
individuals into higher economic brackets and social privilege. Yet the very
broadening of these abilities among greater numbers of people has enabled
economic and technological changes that now destabilize and devalue once
serviceable levels of literate skills. Unending cycles of competition and
change keep raising the stakes for literacy achievement. In fact, as literacy
has gotten implicated in almost all of the ways that money is now made in
America, the reading and writing skills of the population have become grounds
for unprecedented encroachment and concern by those who profit from what those
skills produce. (2)
With this relationship
between individual literacy and profit in mind, Brandt attaches the notion that
literacy benefits individuals who have attained it to the idea that the same
literacy—in the same person—also benefits a larger economic entity that profits
from what that literacy produces. Individual literacy has, in Brandt’s opinion,
become an economic resource - akin to land or iron ore – and as valuable, in
the Information Age, as material resources were during industrial and agrarian
economies in the United States. As such,
there will be attempts to exploit, classify it and control it; as is the case
with any valuable commodity in a capitalist economy.
Despite a strong representation of the economy
as a sponsor of literacy, Brandt by no means considers it the only one. Each learner has multiple sponsors including,
but not limited to: parents, institutions, print and other media, the church
and the workplace; these sponsors, by interaction with each other, generate a
set of circumstances wherein the learner’s level of literacy is either valuable
to or devalued by the dominant economic system. The author uses these themes, sponsors of
literacy and the role of the dominant economy, as a lens through which she
allows us to understand the experiences of individual learner’s in pursuit of
this valuable commodity.
The first chapter of Literacy in American Lives entitled Literacy, Opportunity and Economic Change, Brandt illustrates the
way that literacy can be devalued by the dominant economic system through the
side-by-side portrayal of two women’s literacy experiences. Despite strikingly similar personal histories,
Martha Day and Barbara Hunt undergo a vastly different experience when their
acquired literacies interact with the dominant economic system. The key to understanding the disparity of
experiences is looking at the state of the economic system during their
earliest literacy acquisition.
Martha Day’s earliest literacy learning is
set “within an emerging infrastructure of electric lights, paved roads, rural
mail delivery, rising farm prices, farm journalism and expanding schooling.”
(31) In addition, she formed a network of local cultural assets due to the
social aspects of 19th C agrarian tradition. The maintenance of
these local cultural assets after a geographic relocation and her ability to
apply the skills she learned early to a new line of work meant that Day had a
fairly successful work history.
Barbara Hunt, on the other hand, had the
opposite set of conditions. The local
economy, during her earliest literacy learning, was coming apart. The town she grew up in had no schools or
commercial center so she was unable to form a supportive network. Her rural
upbringing had little relevance to the dominant economic system; she was, at
the time of the interviews, struggling to add value to her literacy skills by
taking classes at a community college. Brandt uses the experiences of these two
women to illustrate the way that an individual’s placement in a dominant
economic system can determine their level of success in the job market.
Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary
America, the second chapter of Literacy in American Lives, portrays the ways in which the absence
of literacy in a largely literate society can deprive an individual of their
civil rights. She argues that in a society wherein political, economic and
social power is increasingly housed in written documents, individuals lacking
the appropriate skills are ever more alienated from the pathways to
success. She represents this
displacement through the experiences of Dwayne Lowery and Johnny Ames.
Lowery,
an auto worker turned union organizer, struggles in an environment that is
rapidly becoming dominated by legal documents and bureaucracy. Lowery, initially successful in negotiations
because he was a good talker and a knowledgeable worker, is quickly outpaced
when lawyers replace untrained municipal representatives on the other side of
the bargaining table. Lowery’s inability to respond to the proliferation of
legal procedure and documents renders him “illiterate” because of the introduction
of a new standard of literacy established by a dominant entity.
Johnny Ames, despite starting from a much
more disadvantaged position, experiences movement in the opposite direction:
from illiteracy to literacy. Brandt’s
focus in Ames’ story is more on the ways that the acquisition of literacy can
lead to personal advocacy than in the effect the dominant economic system has
on said acquisition, however; Ames’
initial literacy opportunities were certainly impacted by prevailing economic
conditions. The product of a rural community under “oppressive political and
economic conditions” (58), Ames left school after 8th grade virtually
unable to read or write. The lack of
sufficient education severely curtails job opportunities and, like many who are
deprived an adequate education, Ames fell into a life of crime; he was
convicted of a capital offense and began serving a life sentence at the age of
twenty-five. Following his conviction, Ames was able to find sponsors, develop
his literacy skills and become a positive force in the lives of other at-risk
youth.
In chapter 3, Accumulating Literacy, Brandt conducts an intergenerational survey
with the intention of revealing the ways in which literacy accumulates and how
the older members of the family act as sponsors of literacy to subsequent
generations. The survey also allows one family to be viewed through the lens of
economic and social change over time, “population movements from farms to urban
centers to suburbs; shifts in the economic base from agriculture to
manufacturing to information processing; the rise of big business; a rapid
escalation in educational expectations; [and] revolutions in communication
technology..” (Brandt 74) The longitudinal focus on the May family study allows
Brandt to depict, generation by generation, how literacy is acquired, utilized,
devalued and discarded, or revamped, in the next generation.
Chapter 4, “The Power of It”, is one of the few sections of Literacy in
American Lives that doesn’t focus on economic factors. Instead, Brandt asserts
that literacy development in the African-American community took place largely
without the support of economic sponsors or other institutions that developed
literacy in the American population as a whole. Brandt notes, “Where the skills
of reading and writing have developed among African Americans, it has rarely
been at the vigorous invitation of economic sponsors.” (Brandt 105) Further,
African Americans have historically encountered racial bias in school settings. Johnny Ames educational experience was marked
by, “ reading and print [that] were often sources of negative racial
messages…prohibitive signs on segregated water
fountains and eateries …his teacher’s reading aloud of the racist story Little Black Sambo…” (Brandt 59) And, in
the segregated schools of the South, it was “typical for the white school board
to economize in funding by hiring ill-prepared teachers.” (Brandt 114) Despite
this unequal distribution of sponsors and alienation from institutions of
education, African Americans have attained a high level of basic literacy by
turning to one of the original sponsors of mass literacy, the Church.
Black churches were the only institutions
in the United States that were free from the domination of mainstream white
society. In church, African Americans
found the means to withstand the hardships of life and the ability to speak
freely of the adversity they experienced on a daily basis. In addition, the church provided a center
around which they could coalesce and enact positive social change including the
formation of literacy programs for members of the community. The church also
gathered the people in numbers necessary to resist individual and institutional
oppression. Acquiring literacy, in the African-American
community, was a means of self-advocacy unavailable to African-Americans
through other channels. The church
remains a force for both education and advocacy programs in the
African-American community. As mainstream society has grown more accepting and
schooling mandatory, African-Americans come into contact with sponsors more
familiar with American society as a whole.
They still; however, are marked by the inception of literacy acquisition
in the church.
In Chapter 5, The Sacred and the Profane,
Brandt chronicles the disparity of experiences with regard to the literacy
building blocks: reading and
writing. Many of Brandt’s subjects had
positive associations with regard to early reading experiences. Three quarters of her respondents said that
“reading and books were actively endorsed in their households.” (Brandt 130)
Reading was an intimate activity, associated with family gatherings and had the
characteristics of a social activity.
Books were given as gifts and available for free at public libraries;
there was a prestige associated with reading: Olga Nelson’s “finishing-school
mother taught Olga and her sisters to distinguish themselves as a little more
refined” by virtue of their being “a reading family.” (Brandt 153) Questions
regarding early memories of writing produce the opposite effect. It was a far
more uncommon skill. Many were able to
read; writing was for the few. Negative associations often started with
disparagement concerning the mechanics, “Handwriting was recalled as a heavily
monitored activity, and those who struggled with it remember it as a source of
humiliation of defeat.”(Brandt 164) That initial censure often had far-reaching
effects, as with the case of a “68 year old former Spanish teacher [who] said
that poor handwriting in her early education discouraged her from writing.”
(Brandt 164) In addition, writing in schools usually to on expository form
aimed at proving that you’d read and understood required reading material. Brandt describes a shift with regard to these
skills precipitated by economic forces that now require a new or higher
literacy. Brandt notes,
Basic
literacy is no longer adequate – advanced proficiency is required. Another way
to understand this transformation in literacy is to see that writing is
beginning to overtake reading as the more fundamental literate skill. Writing is the more productive member of the
pair, and with literacy now a key productive force in the information economy,
writing not only documents work but also increasingly comprises the work that
many people do. (148)
This shift in the
requisite literacy reiterates one of Brandt’s major themes: the economy is a
major force behind ascending literacy requirements and responsible for
devaluing formerly acceptable levels of literacy.
In
Chapter 6, The Means of Production,
Brandt explores the reasons for ever increasing stratification in the latter part
of the twentieth century. She illustrates the potential cause of the exploitation
of literacy by reworking the Marxist definition of the relations of production: the relationship between those who own the
means of production (the capitalists)
and those who don’t (the workers.)
Capitalism is a mode of production that relies on the private ownership
of the means of production (factories,
machines and raw materials) wherein capitalists and workers are locked in an
antagonistic relationship; what is beneficial for one is detrimental to the
other and vice versa. In order to remain competitive, the owners
of the means of production must
extract as much labor as possible from the workers for the lowest possible
cost. Prior to the Information Age, the relationship between capitalists and
workers was straightforward, if not equitable; however, that relationship
becomes more complicated when literacy is considered part of the means of
production. Brandt states,
The
transformation of the American labor force from principally manufacturing in
the 1940’s to principally knowledge production and control in the 1980’s gauges
the ascending role of literacy as both labor input and product output…Further,
however, literacy is also a means of production-that is, a tool, an instrument,
a technology… in an information economy, literacy shows up in all aspects of
production: as raw material, as labor power, as an instrument of production,
and as product. (171)
Brandt’s classification
of literacy as central to the current dominant economic system designates the
economy as a major sponsor of literacy:
an agency or process that promotes—or withholds literacy—in order to profit
from it. In addition, literacy once
acquired, will be viewed through the lens of prevailing economic forces and
declared valuable or worthless.
Brandt connects the strength of economic
forces to the role of the schools with regard to inequalities in literacy
achievement. For some, the differences
in literacy achievement prove schools’ complicity in maintaining those
inequalities. Brandt states,
Educators
at all levels deal with curriculum and performance standards that emanate from
governments, regents, district offices, or other centralized agencies. These standards, which usually come in the
form of objective aims, goals, requirements, outcome criteria, and so on,
usually mask the struggles among competing parties that have gone into their
making. They almost always deliver, in unquestioned ways, the prevailing
interests of dominant economies. (45)
Brandt, while
acknowledging the dominance of the economy in all facets of literacy
acquisition, implies that the role of schools is not to churn out workers but
to educate; to teach skills that will allow students, at all levels of literacy
to, build upon and transfer their skills from one set of economic conditions to
the next.
In
Literacy in American Lives, Deborah Brandt makes a compelling case that
failure to acquire literacy has many meanings and many causes. The role of the
economy and unending cycles of competition devalue literacy faster and faster. The Information Age brings us new technology
every day, the economy requires that workers both supply raw materials in the
form of literacy and process that material into the finished product:
information. Especially at issue, is the
role that education plays in this process.
It is a fresh perspective on a familiar topic and raises quite a few
questions: why are the schools failing to adequately educate their student
population? Why are community colleges so underfunded? Why are entire
departments being removed from the curriculum? Brandt, convincingly opines,
that economic forces are so strong educational facilities are teaching only up
to the level that the economy makes possible.
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