National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

Critical Literacy

Cr itical Literacy In his landmark study, Nations and Nationalism, historian Ernest Gellner outlines the features he feels are necessary for the rise and maintenance of a modern nation. These essentials include power, which some in a nation’s population will have and some will not, and a shared culture, which is transmitted in several ways, not the least of which is through a system of education. Gellner describes education’s role in the circulation of culture this way: The next element in the model is access to education or to a viable modern high culture (the two being treated as equivalent). The notion of education or a viable modern high culture is once again very loose but nonetheless useful. It refers to that complex of skills which makes a man competent to occupy most of the ordinary positions in modern society, and which makes him, so to speak, able to swim with ease in this kind of cultural medium. It is a syndrome rather than a strict list: no single item in it is, perhaps, absolutely indispensable. Literacy is no doubt central to it. (1983, 89) Literacy is a chief vehicle, in this perspective, for bonding an individual to a society and unifying a nation through the values attached to it by the society it serves. Literacy values perpetuate the integrity as well as the boundaries of the social fabric. They are nationalist in intent and effect. Of course, that is not the whole story of literacy. If it were, there would be no divisions within national populations, no resistances. Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union legislated the teaching of the Russian language to the citizens of its various republics. The objective was to foster national cohesion through a taught love of Russian culture. (Indeed, the English-only movement in the United States is an AngloSaxon version of the same nationalist motivation.) The Soviet attempt at homogenization failed because it did not recognize the value of diversity and because it underestimated the cultural commitments of its citizens; the US movement is doomed to similar failure. Still, we educators in the United States have longed understood that our curricula inculcate capitalist values in our students. We have listened to critical theorists, such as Louis Althusser (2009), who have explicated Critical Literacy     137 how the educational system acts as a state ideological apparatus, calling —or “interpellating”—students into the ideology of the nation. Sociologists of education, such as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976), have described how school systems exist to produce compliant workers for American industry. Critical educators, such as Paulo Freire (1972, 2000), Henry Giroux (2000, 2001), Ira Shor (1992), and Kathleen Weiler (1988, 1992) have articulated the ways in which teacher-centered education trains students to be passive receptors for knowledge and ideology . And educational researchers, such as Paul Willis (1977), have told us how working class children learn attitudes and work habits at school that script their places in the workforce as menial laborers. In addition, linguists and literacy researchers, such as Basil Bernstein (1971, 1973, 1990), have taught us that the literacy styles that students bring to school mark them for success or struggle, and that, too often, schools respond to these styles by tracking, by prohibiting home styles, or simply by marking disempowered students down. In the same vein, Jean Anyon (1980, 1981, 1997) has argued that the literacy practices that students bring to school track them for success or failure. Shirley Brice Heath (1983) has demonstrated, perhaps more clearly than anyone, how home literacy works for or against, depending on the student’s home, the educational opportunities and successes students will likely have. Patrick Finn (1999) has explained that our challenge is to help working class students and parents realize their right to claim critical or “powerful” literacy instruction for themselves. And Irvin Peckham (2010) has argued that we need to do some serious thinking about how we use writing to sort people— and take some serious action to democratize our pedagogies once we do. I barely scratch the surface here of the many wake-up calls we have had, and I have not done service to the ones I have listed. But one thing is clear from reading the work of these researchers: schools, colleges and universities are ideological state apparatuses that enforce, through ideological indoctrination, the capitalist economic system of the United States (and this is true of curricula offered and pedagogies implemented by many critical, cultural and leftist...