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27 { I=L;NC=IGGCNG?HN;H>LCNC=;F CN?L;=S CONNECTED TO Deweyan speculations about critical intelligence, “critical literacy” took hold as a term in composition studies during the 1970s as the work of Paulo Freire gained ascendance and was engaged by scholars like Ann Berthoff, Henry Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, and Ira Shor.1 In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire writes the seemingly oxymoronic phrase, “freedom is acquired by conquest” (31). However, he did not mean by conquest the subjugation of others. He meant that people had to work for freedom by recognizing the causes of their oppression, a recognition that is necessary to the task of social transformation. This heightened perception, or conscientizacao, is to be used to identify the specific social, economic, and political contradictions to be transcended. Freire understood that language is a crucial aspect of liberation because only through “naming the world,” imprinting one’s own discursive construal on the environment, can one have a chance to participate in it on one’s own terms. Education is deemed authentic, therefore, to the extent that it demands active student involvement and deliberately aids in the formation of student critical consciousness. “Authentic education,” Freire states classically, “is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B,’ mediated by the world—a world which challenges both parties 28 SOCRATIC COMMITMENT AND CRITICAL LITERACY giving rise to views or opinions about it” (82). Literacy, in this view, is critical social practice, not the mere acquisition or transmission of technical skills. Or as Giroux elaborates in the introduction to Freire and Macedo’s volume Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, “Literacy is best understood as a myriad of discursive forms and cultural competencies that construct and make available the various relations and experiences that exist between learners and the world” (10). Critical literacy is, he continues, “both a narrative for agency as well as a referent for critique” (10). In an essay titled “What Is Literacy?” Shor adds, “Critical literacy can be thought of as a social practice itself and as a tool for the study of other social practices” (10). When I think of the difference between functional literacy and critical literacy, I often recall little Pecola Breedlove of Toni Morrison’s splendid first novel The Bluest Eye. Pecola could decode the primer containing the dominant and dominating white, suburban, Dick-and-Jane narrative, but to her demise, she could neither deconstruct that story nor resist it. Cornel West considers Freire to have been an exemplary intellectual and practitioner. In “Paulo Freire,” he lauded the educator’s project of “democratic dialogue” that was “attuned to the concrete operations of power (in and out of the classroom)” (179). He feels that Freireanstyle , Socratic questioning is much needed today as we grapple with public discourse, particularly as such discourse is influenced by the media. Decrying that market values drive many media decisions, he contends that corporate media are largely responsible for constricting and constraining political dialogue, which he describes as “so formulaic, so tailored into poll-driven, focus-group-approved slogans that don’t really say anything substantive or strike at the core of our lived experience” (Democracy Matters 64). Moreover, he is critical of entertainment broadcasts masquerading as insightful news, a turn of events that represents the dominance of titillation over useful testimony. The desired role of the media as a fair, balanced, and fundamental component of a critical democracy has been compromised, in West’s view, by what he terms “vulgar partisanship” (Democracy Matters 38). The Practice of Critical Literacy For composition instructors, who teach many media consumers, there is hope in the general study of Freire and West and in specific rhetorical schema like those of Donald Lazere, who makes critical thinking about politics central to his classroom. Responding deftly to claims 29 SOCRATIC COMMITMENT AND CRITICAL LITERACY by the likes of Maxine Hairston that composition courses should not be politicized, Lazere knows that they already have been overly politicized, ensconced rather tamely within a white supremacist, patriarchal , capitalist norm. Ironically, he depoliticizes the classroom or at least disrupts hegemonic comfort by establishing politics as the main and express object of rhetorical inquiry. He enables students to consider a wide array of ideological perspectives and develop facility in interrogating those positions, the very activities that should lie at the heart of civic literacy and humanistic education. Although he himself leans toward democratic socialism, Lazere...

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