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145 I n the context of citizenship training in the United States, literacy has been used as a means to ease anxieties about citizenship by cultivating assimilation , empowerment, and employability. The imperative for literacy in each of the three training sites examined in the previous chapters has been influenced by the imagined ways that literacy will prepare students for future identities in the face of anxiety about changes to work, to the demographics of the country, to the economy, and even to the legal boundaries of citizenship. These anxieties , especially those rooted in concerns about economic survival and creating a culture of productivity among a certain segment of Americans, shaped citizenship training—what it taught, where it happened, and who it targeted. In the immigrant citizenship programs, students learned lessons of punctuality and obedience through literacy learning. For the union education supporters , literacy represented a means to gain power in the workplace by increasing union membership and empowering unionists. And for students gaining the credential of formal higher education, teachers of advanced literacy showed themselves to be immensely concerned with the usefulness of writing classes for students’ futures as both workers and engaged citizens. From all of these disparate ideas of how literacy would shape citizenship and the quality of that citizenship for students emerges a narrative of equality that is essential to defining the American citizen. The importance of these different locations and manifestations of literacy supports an ever-present American equality narrative , positioning literacy as a crucial component in the achievement of equal citizenship. 5 teaching literacy and citizenship in the twenty-first century 146 teaching literacy and citizenship in the twenty-first century Such anxieties about citizenship persist in the United States, a nation that prides itself on being a country of immigrants.1 And literacy, in its various forms and definitions, continues to play a role. The early twentieth century’s development of the “culture of aspiration,” as David O. Levine characterizes it, marked the beginning of a period of profound growth in higher education , thus allowing literacy to be increasingly defined by formal education. Throughout the twentieth century, higher education operated on a mode of expansion as governmental guidance toward providing equal opportunity in higher education, such as the 1944 G.I. Bill (Thelin 262), the 1947 President’s Commission on Higher Education (Hutcheson 364), and the development of regional public institutions (Thelin 206). Additionally, the expansion of higher education was generated by fights over access to institutions by those who have been traditionally shut out, such as during the civil rights movement and with the open admissions of the 1970s (Otte and Mlynarczyk 5), and by the culture of higher education, which saw the rise of the “multiversity” with its “varied, even conflicting” interests over how to provide mass education (Kerr 15). As Kerr describes, this expansion often relied on a combination of government , political, and cultural interests, such as with the Defense Education Act of 1958, which channeled federal funds into university research as a response to Cold War anxieties and thus expanded the reach of higher education (Kerr 53; Thelin 278).2 This expansion has continued into the twenty-first century. With the White House statement, “Building American Skills through Community Colleges,” in 2010, the Obama administration made another national effort to expand higher education, establishing two national goals for higher education to be met by 2020: graduating the highest proportion of college students than any other country and creating resources for community colleges to graduate an additional 5 million students. As a result of this expansion and the increasing ubiquity of higher education , university-styled advanced literacy has become even more influential in the production of citizenship. This chapter looks to the present day and the continuing uses of education and employability as measures of an individual ’s potential for citizenship through concerns about reforming immigration policy, growing questions about the relevance of a college degree, the expansion of higher education, and the belief that higher education can help a person ’s chances for employment. All are rooted in the same faith in what literacy can do to help produce good citizens, versions of the literacy hope found in union education programs and the productivity and usefulness underscored by Americanization programs and in college classrooms. It is imperative to recognize the cultural management of citizenship that occurred through different kinds of literacy training and to understand what kind of cultural management [3.145.186.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 07...

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