What's literacy got to do with it?

Since the first rustic schoolhouses were raised in Puritan New England over 300 years ago, there has been an explicit belief in the economic, personal, and even spiritual power of literacy. Indeed, as we march through the first years of the twenty-first century, it is virtually impossible to find a politician who won't speak reverently about the efficacy of having an education and the precious gift of reading. Such, it is interesting to note, is the case today as it was during virtually every period of our past.

Early seventeenth-century American colonists required each village to construct a school and begin the formidable task of teaching reading. It was the belief of early leaders that reading would precipitate Bible study, unity, and a more devoted citizenry. One century later, Thomas Jefferson rose from the Enlightenment to tell colonists that "reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error."

In the nineteenth century, educator Horace Mann surveyed the blight of poverty in sprawling U.S. cities and championed the notion of universal schooling as a panacea in the fight to elevate the conditions of the poor and dispossessed. Like others before and after, Mann saw the idea of education as a solution to a series of social and economic conundrums. With the masses migrating from Europe--and the visage of poverty visiting every large city--the desire to educate and mold these beleaguered hoards was seen as the most effective way to create an egalitarian system and also to Americanize the collection of varying cultures and religions.

In contemporary times, what is most striking about our veneration of literacy and the historic campaign to eliminate ignorance is the conspicuous chasm that separates appearance from reality. While we have lived with an unflinching faith in the efficacy of education to better our lives and even the economic playing field, little evidence exists as to the reality of this long-held American dream. In fact, there is considerable scholarship to support the claim that literacy and education--those dual weapons for egalitarian aspirations--are actually components of the status quo, working to stifle real change and suppress genuine revolt.

Perhaps, many suggest, it is time to interrogate the venerated power of literacy and the time-honored role of education. Are they champions of the downtrodden or agents of oppression? Do they propel students into new levels of success or do they perpetuate a system that is fundamentally skewed toward the affluent? Why, more than one century after Mann suggested that education was "the great equalizer of the conditions of men," do we still see literacy rates plummeting while society worships at the feet of such celebrities as Britney Spears, Dale Earnhardt, and Shaquille O'Neil? Could it be that students and their parents know something that few public officials have the temerity to admit about education and its waning influence in the real world of success?

Ask most poor or middle-class seventeen-year-olds what they want to be and you're likely to get an eclectic bag of professions and entertainment options, beginning with actor and singer and moving nervously into the sphere of salesperson or sports icon. Few, it is interesting to note, seem to have embraced the American notion that success is rooted in education and the ethic of garnering a degree. Sure, most would admit that it helps, but few today would suggest that either Tiger Woods or Eddie Murphy lost valuable years by omitting the Ivy Leagues for the lucrative life of sports or entertainment. Even more interesting, many minority students seem uncertain that education--with its costs of time and money--will result in a better life either economically or personally. No, many admit, education--with its political games and alien culture--has little to do with real success for a person who wants to maintain an identity. It's simply no longer part of the formula.

Today there is an added theory. Not only do education and literacy in practice fail to "balance the wheel of social machinery," as Mann suggested, but they actually constitute the engine that stultifies change and hinders revolt. Rather than liberating people to critique their world in a more effective, more probing and cerebral way, education is a device of domestication, acting to stave off rebellion and silence the individual. "The educational institutions are usually the main agencies of transmission of an effective dominant culture and this is now a major economic as well as cultural activity," writes philosopher Raymond Williams in "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" in the 1976 book Schooling and Capitalism.

Williams has a point. Hegemony, or the control and manipulation of people through social and cultural institutions, is best served when potentially disparate groups are conditioned to believe they are inferior and in need of an "education." Schooling, in this context, becomes a vehicle for the advancement of cultural transmission and the eradication of divergent, potentially cumbersome difference. Young pupils learn early in their scholastic careers that school is very different from home and that their distinctive ways of speaking and learning often aren't welcomed or considered standard in their classrooms. Getting an education means being filled with a knowledge that thrusts students into a pot that is uniform, stagnant, and designed to fit a very specific cultural recipe. Years ago, Malcolm X labeled it a curriculum that had been "whitened" to fit the verities of the white majority. Again, Williams responds to this conditioning, suggesting that the process of education is actually the process of "social training" that results in the "continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture."

With this in mind, it becomes easier for us to consider and dispel the myth of education as an integral step on the way to economic advancement. The fact is, many lucrative careers are already safely ensconced in the Ivy Leagues, and those positions are, with few exceptions, limited to the wealthy and powerful. Only about 10 percent of the students who apply to Ivy League schools are ever actually accepted, and of those fortunate students a large number are those who came from wealth and privilege in the first place.

Consider for a moment that the rate for "legacy admissions"--for those who are related to Ivy League graduates--is 40 percent. That means that, if you're somehow related to an Ivy League graduate and apply to that school, your chances of being accepted have increased beyond the dreams of the average middle-class applicant. It is the proverbial door of opportunity being ceremoniously closed to those without a rich relative, and it has little to do with either merit or justice. "Class standing and consequently life chances are largely determined at birth," argues Gregory Mantsios in Paula Rothenberg's Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (1995). "Dramatic advances in class standing are relatively few," with only one in five men surpassing the economic status of their fathers.

Education, then, isn't about learning but knowing the right people; it isn't about going to school but going to the right school--accomplishments that are simply beyond the control of the average person. Even with a 4.0 average and elevated test scores, most middle-class students have little hope of breaking into the Ivy League. And it is significant to note that it is almost exclusively in the Ivy League where influence is meted out and translated into money and power.

Consider for a moment that 50 percent of the top chief executive officers in the United States are all from ten elite universities, making half of the top business leaders in the country--as defined by Business Week--graduates of ten exclusive schools. Even more edifying, reports Kenneth Ciongoli in "Discriminating Against Middle-Class Ethnic Americans" in a November 1999 issue of USA Today, is the fact that "50 percent of the Secretaries of State from the beginning of the republic through the twentieth century have been graduates of one school--Harvard." For the rest of us, little room exists to wield real influence, and the "opportunity that our forebears waxed eloquently about seems about as accessible as being admitted to Yale with a poor grade point average. Indeed, unless one is born into a Harvard or Princeton education, little chance exists for it to become a reality. So much for equal access to the top rungs of the economic ladder. So much for opportunity based upon merit.

Perhaps this is why so many Americans are so apathetic about an education. While the myth continues to urge us to work and study our Shakespeare, the facts tell a more daunting, less hopeful tale. Certainly education can lead to good things when compared to dropping out of high school, but the magnitude of those advantages are limited and often exaggerated. At best they mean we can get admitted to a state college and work toward a degree that will probably lump us into the ever-constricting throng of the middle class. This occurs, of course, if the person is lucky enough not to be an education major Teachers, it is interesting to note, have actually seen their average incomes, when adjusted for inflation, go down in the last decade. According to Greg Toppo in the May 17, 2001, Detroit Free Press, the average teacher salary in the 1999-2000 school year was up 3.2 percent from the previous year but was less than the 3.4 percent rise in the inflation rate.

Literacy, then, for all of its promises and ambiguities, has come to be seen by many as little more than a device to control and manage. While the American tradition tells us that reading and writing reap personal and professional rewards, the reality suggests that they are methods for inculcation and subtle indoctrination--that they are controlled by the very powers that they are supposed to overcome and work to perpetuate a class system. Instead of offering the kind of liberation and insight that is recalled in biographies by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other fugitive slaves, literacy is too often imbued with the ideologies of the groups which seek to influence children and promulgate their political agenda to future generations.

Struggles over textbooks, as an example, rarely revolve around the critical thought of our citizenry but are more often about certain ideologies and the influence that certain political parties wield. When we grapple over standardized tests, functional literacy, and a host of other issues, many of us are able to see the imperious hand of political manipulation--the interest of big business in "choice" and the conservative influence in a "moment of silence." Education today isn't about free inquiry and it has little to do with the critical thinking of our society. Perhaps the rock band Pink Floyd said it best when it suggested in "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II": "We don't need no education/We don't need no thought control." Economist Samuel Bowles punctuates that point when he argues that American education has become a "mechanism for social control in the interests of political stability."

What, then, is the origin of the problem? Perhaps it begins with the way the exercise of free inquiry--of personal searches for knowledge--has been compromised and destroyed by the inextricable power of politics. Perhaps it has something to do with the despotic, manipulative, and highly politicized education that is offered? Perhaps it involves the heavy hand of various groups to use schooling as a way to perpetuate a class system rather than as a vehicle to end it? Before we can appreciate the failure of literacy in the United States, we must first understand the political context in which Americans are all taught--the agendas that pervade students and usurp their ability to be empowered by literacy. Why have reading and writing come to be seen as a useless set of skills--skills which have little to do with democracy and altruism? Perhaps it has something to do with the hulking system attached to literacy and the demand that one forfeit one's own culture and values on the way to becoming functionally literate.

In the 1988 book Perspectives on Literacy, historian Harvey Graft contends that the purpose of literacy across time hasn't been to empower and liberate but to control and socialize. This, Graft continues, is the reason why campaigns to educate people within various historical contexts have wrought insignificant results. While literacy has been sold as an invaluable package of power, people have come to understand its political purposes and have been left impotent as a result.

Throughout history, Graft argues, literacy has been used as an instrument of control, as a way to socialize generations of people to embrace the status quo and accept it as their beliefs. More than a cerebral or personal exercise, education has always been more akin to a catechism, where young pupils were told what to believe and how to behave. Because of this, literacy was never an invaluable personal skill. Rather, it was a tool for indoctrination--a skill to help one read sacred books and become practiced in cultural mandates. "It is important," writes Graft, "to stress the integrating and hegemony--creating functions of literacy provisions through formal schooling." Rather than a tool for individual expression, literacy was "a vital aspect of the maintenance of social stability."

Of the many groups which participated in the campaign to make its population more literate, none was more ardent than the Christian church. Throughout American history, it was the imperious hand of religion--working in concert with government--that sponsored literacy training. Of course, it wasn't the goal of either the church or the government to use literacy as a way to empower individuals or emancipate them with the ability to write political diatribes or publish material that questioned the orthodoxy.

Perhaps the best example of how literacy was used as a way to control and manipulate students comes in the books that were used for instruction and the didactic approach that was practiced. In early years of the republic, students were educated by reading the sectarian propaganda of the New England Primer and its various literary complements. As a collection, these works established the firm agenda and rigid values of the leaders and quashed any lingering vestiges of rebellion. First published in 1690, the Primer was reprinted countless times and sold over three million copies in the 150 years of its use. During its reign, the Primer reminded students that they were sinners and that obedience and selflessness were elements of salvation. Key to the book's amazing success was the trepidation and guilt that it inspired and the lingering sense of obligation. Students quickly learned that education wasn't about self-actualization but cleansing, reform, and fealty. Filled with couplets like "In Adam's fall/We sinned all," the Primer--and other books that were used in concert with it--were classic devices for keeping the gaggle of disparate citizens in line, assuring an ardent defense of the status quo.

Centuries later, students are no longer harangued with the sanctimony of Calvinistic New England, but the concept of school as a molder and shaper of human obedience is still manifest in many of its practices. Indeed, few institutions are more effective at estranging students from their culture and heritage than twelve years of literacy education in the United States. Much of this program begins with batteries of tests designed to reveal differences that must be methodically expunged if the school is to be deemed successful. Standard English and lists of standardized readings have historically been implacable, uncompromising goals, so it is incumbent upon the system to eradicate difference and create a system that mirrors hegemonic leaders. Thus, on a very simple level, we see the evisceration of culture in the attack on fundamental elements of language and culture.

Most glaring in this scenario is the work of E. D. Hirsch, a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of the 1987 book Cultural Literacy. For years it has been Hirsch's thesis that the United States must teach a common culture and that it should be inculcated methodically and uniformly to students. "Common culture," however, requires that other, less pervasive or powerful cultures be omitted, it requires standardization and uniformity. In the process, the verities of many communities are expunged or marginalized. Ways of defining their world--and distinctive ways of describing it--are being supplanted by official lists that seem to forever mirror the pantheon of white America.

The result? The propensity to speak in a vernacular and to value oral over written language is a distinctive trait of African Americans that is quickly assailed in the world of serious scholastics. In its place, students are told that only standard English is correct and worthy. The hip-hop of the streets--with its rhythmic, often irreverent language--is neither understood nor accepted in academic contexts. In the same way, the double negative of the Hispanic or the subject/verb agreement problems that often come with the African American and other marginalized groups are quickly remediated in classes that treat minority students like sick patients or unregenerate sinners. Never mind the fact that these were cherished staples of both cultures' languages and that they resonate quite effectively in the world of music and television. Literacy, we quickly understand, is about expunging difference, so that the hoards can emulate the affluent and learn more about their deficiencies and the language of power.

In his 1989 book Lives on the Boundary, English professor Mike Rose of the University of California at Los Angeles writes about the historic effort of universities to mold disparate students by scrubbing away precious cultural colors and treating education as if it were analogous to curing sick patients. "One of the nicknames for remedial sections was sick sections," writes Rose. Such an approach, he adds, creates an atmosphere that equates difference with disease or sickness. Students who visit writing clinics to have their problems diagnosed are taught that their language is inappropriate and substandard. Through tests and various academic exercises, it takes only a short time for students to equate graduating with overcoming a cultural sickness that they were given by their parents. Education, then, becomes analogous to genocide and an apotheosis of the affluent. Rose describes the teaching of writers at UCLA this way:

   We still talk of writers as suffering from specifiable, locatable defects,
   deficits, and handicaps that can be localized, circumscribed, and remedied.
   Such talk carries with it the etymological wisps and traces of disease and
   serves to exclude from the academic community those who are so labeled.
   They sit in scholastic quarantine until their disease can be diagnosed and
   remedied.

In the process, students are made to feel as if their language is not only different but pathological and tainted--and that it is the job of the school to help them by expunging their heritage. Thus, he adds, education becomes a rather blatant, unabashed act of cultural evisceration, where colleges inculcate the standards of fealty and orthodoxy while providing reasons for hating one's past. "The curriculum in developmental English," concludes Rose, "breeds a deep social and intellectual isolation from print; it fosters attitudes and beliefs about written language that, more than anything, keep students from becoming fully, richly literate."

In modern times, this practice, gleaned from the seventeenth century and refined to fit the complexities of the twenty-first century, has come to be called reproduction. According to educator Henry Giroux, reproduction is the act of making certain that the values and the legacies of the hegemonic group be exulted and reproduced as the community standard. "Reproduction," writes Giroux in his 1997 book Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope, "refers to texts and social practices whose messages, inscribed within specific historic settings and social contexts, function primarily to legitimate the interests of the dominant order." Thus, students enter public schools with a plethora of cultural literacy to learn and famous people to exult. Standardization is integral to reproduction, since it creates a pantheon of authors and texts to celebrate and relegates students to passive memorization of these people and their works. And so the timeless debate over what should be placed in the academic canon takes on a more profound and political tenor. Political groups are quick to recognize the way certain books reflect cultural values and maintain the rhythms of power.

Most stark in this reproduction is the carefully orchestrated and guarded assertion that the United States is the land of opportunity, the home of the free, the bastion of equality and humanity. In fact, as history books are loathe to show, since it foments debate and change, the United States was predicated on the idea that certain people are better than others and that it is natural to subjugate those of different genders and colors. Even more unsettling are the margins between rich and poor, which are as wide and disconcerting as at any time in our supposedly less enlightened past.

Such facts, however, are rarely heard in the typical public school since it is the purpose of schools to inspire patriotism, order, and satisfaction. Reproduction, with its agenda to deify the system and generate order is quick to showcase the positive and mitigate the negative. And so, as historian Howard Zinn contends in his 1990 book The Politics of History, our schools are eager to tell the glorious stories of John D. Rockefeller and Teddy Roosevelt but are silent when it comes to radicals like Eugene Debs or Upton Sinclair. Indeed, how many Americans have even heard of Eugene Debs or Mother Jones? How many have read the condescending prose of Thomas Jefferson, who believed that some groups of people were superior to others and deserved an exulted position in society because of their inherent advantages?

Perhaps this is why it has been a long tradition in the United States to ignore or trivialize the work of women and exclude their work from "serious" canonical literature. In his essay "Women and Literary History," Dale Spender contends that women have been excluded from university lists of literature simply because they are women:

   I was led to believe that all the formative writing had been the province
   of men. So along with other graduates of Eng Lit departments I left the
   university with the well cultivated impression that men had created the
   novel and that there were no women novelists (or none of note) before Jane
   Austen.

This theory, Spender continues, is simply political and is driven by a desire to maintain a reading list that exults men and their agendas. With such a scenario, it is easy to minimize the importance of women in other contexts and justify their marginal status in society. Perhaps this is why generations of women who wrote before Jane Austen were simply ignored by the men who identified great writers. To extend such a prominence to women would be to acknowledge their skills and even superiority to men. It would be a stride toward treating them as equals cerebrally as well as emotionally.

And yet it is clear that women not only wrote before Austen's nineteenth century but wrote well and with an influence that eclipsed their meager status. The eighteenth century was a watershed for female writers and, according to Spender, "They were both the actual and `esteemed majority.'" Spender continues:

   Yet not only has this achievement been edited out of literary history, but
   a false version has been substituted in its place. A distorted version that
   makes no mention of women's former greatness, but which presents the birth
   of the novel solely in terms of men.

And so we begin to understand the collective distrust that many Americans hold toward education. Much like Huckleberry Finn, when he moaned that he never wanted to be "civilized," many have come to see education as an institution that stultifies and enervates--that uses its power for the perpetuation of a plutocracy. Instead of being the catalyst for change, for progress, for a more just and thoughtful society, it seems to often be the instrument of indoctrination--the first step in an ordeal that expunges people of their differences. "Knowledge is never neutral," argues John Fiske in Reading the Popular (1989). "It never exists in an empiricist, objective relationship to the real. Knowledge is power, and the circulation of knowledge is part of the social distribution of power."

Such is the case with literacy and education in our society. Knowledge is power and it is imperative that knowledge be meted out in doses that maintain rather than challenge the present system. And so it is hardly surprising that conservatives are challenging the notion that tolerance toward gays and lesbians should be taught in schools. Such a movement would only work to weaken the grip of religious groups in society. In the same way, it is essential that only positive images of the United States be presented in literature and history classes--so that students aren't stirred to question the stark inequities of the free market and the limitations of a two-party system of government.

In reviewing the role of education in our society, perhaps it would be prudent to consider the ways it acts to distribute power and the subjective way it works to legitimate some cultures over others. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the value of education and literacy in a society that uses it more often as a cudgel than an instrument for equality. As Michael Apple of the University of Wisconsin argues in Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (1993):

   Our aim should not be to create functional literacy but critical literacy,
   powerful literacy, political literacy, which enables the growth of genuine
   understanding and control of all the spheres of social life in which we
   participate.

Such dynamic learning will only be possible when schooling becomes democratic rather than despotic, when it abandons its political agenda and facilitates a curriculum that embraces real diversity and the intellectual growth of its populace.

Gregory Shafer holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan and teaches at Mott College in Flint, Michigan.