Rachael Shapiro

Gee, J. P. “The Legacies of Literacy: From Plato to Freire through Harvey Graff.” Journal of Education 171.1 (1989): 147–65. Print.

Summary

In this review essay, Gee builds on Graff’s The Legacies of Literacy to put forth some of his own questions about literacy. Following an excellent recount of what Graff terms “the literacy myth,” Gee returns to Plato who was the first to combat writing in writing (149). Via Socrates, Plato argues that writing is detrimental to memory, supports a false kind of/concept of knowledge that is external to the self, and is mostly incapable of the dialogic method to which he is so committed for its pursuit of pure, beautiful knowledge. Gee points out Plato’s hypocrisy, however, and demonstrates how Plato’s is the first in a long line of theoretical and actual moments of literacy endorsed and controlled by the state. He writes that “Plato’s contradiction is real, and the literacy myth can be seen as a response to it” (154).

That literacy can be liberatory, but can also be an ISA is demonstrated through a look at pervasive literacy in Sweden by the end of the 18th century where poverty was still rampant, but the Church and state had considerable control over the masses. Similarly, Gee/Graff look at Scribner and Coles’ 1981 The Psychology of Literacy, wherein a study of literacy among the Vai in Liberia reveals that literacy and education share myths that are actually undermined by material reality (getting jobs is less about literacy or education and more about how those things are valued). Through these and other examples, Gee explores the side of the Platonic contradiction that shows literacy to have the effect of uncritical acceptance of hegemonic values as natural.

Turning to the liberatory side of the Platonic literacy dilemma, Gee cites Freire’s emphasis on “correct thinking,” and concludes that “Freire has his Republic too. There is no way out of Plato’s dilemma. Literacy always comes with a perspective on interpretation that is ultimately political. One can hide that perspective the better to claim it isn’t there, or one can put it out in the open. Plato, Sweden, and Freire–each has a perspective, and a strong one” (162).

In his concluding section, Gee poses the question: “Can truly emancipatory literacy and literacy education evolve in a society without a prior or concomitant social revolution, the sort of revolution that has rarely in history been seen without violence and major social upheaval?” (164). He goes on to reason out the nature of literacy (or interpretations serving as proof of literacy) as always a matter of social construction, and hence, literacy is a social practice more than an autonomous entity that can be studied in and of itself (164-5). Thus, he concludes in answer to his question that literacy is not the thing that needs to be changed so much as the social institutions that define it: schools.

He ends with a quote from Raymond Williams via Michael Apple:

It is only in a shared belief and insistance that there are practical alternatives that the balance of forces and chances begins to alter. Once the inevitablilties are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey of hope. If there are no easy answers there are still available discoverable hard answers, and it is these that we can now learn to make and share. This had been, from the beginning, the sense and the impulse of the long revolution. (Williams, 1983, pp. 268-9). (165)

Quotes

The most striking continuity in the history of literacy that emerges form Graff’s book is the way literacy has been used, in age after age, to solidify the social hierarchy, empower the eliters, and ensure that people lower on the hierarchy accept the values, norms, and beliefs of the eliters, even when it is not in their self-interest (or “class interest”) to do so. (159)

Nonetheless, the fact that these national norms more closely match the local or community-based behavior of the middle class than they do those below them on the social scale favors the former against the latter. Futhermore, the process whereby lower-class speakers condemn their own comminity-based behaviors as compared to these national norms undergirds the myth that these norms are somehow natireal and God-given, when in fact they represent merely the historical empowering of one set of localized, comminity-based conventional behaviors over other sets. The concept of hegemony argues that this mdel applied to a range of behaviors and attitudes well beyond language. (160)

In the end, we might say that, contrary to the literacy myth, nothing follows from literacy or schooling. Much follows, however, from what comes with literacy and schooling, what literacy and schooling come wrapped up in; namely, the attitudes, values, norms, and beliefs (at once social, cultural, and political) that always accompany literacy and schooling. These consequences may be work habits that facilitate industrialization, abilities in “expository talk in contrived situations,” a religiously or politically quiescent population, radical opposition to colonial oppressors, and any number of other things. A text, whether written on paper, on the soul (Plato), or on the world (Freire), is a loaded weapon. The person, the educator, who hands over the gun, hands over the bullets (the perspective), and must own up to the consequences. There is no way out of having an opinion, an ideology, and a strong one–as did Plato, as does Freire. Literacy education is not for the timid. (162-3)