Week 2 Reading Response

In her “Introduction” and second chapter of Producing Good Citizens, Amy Wan offers a brief introduction to how literacy—though held up as an ideal tool in securing equality, liberation, security, and citizenship—has actually been used to reinforce hierarchical class and racial divisions in many circumstances. Wan’s “Introduction” specifically overviews how critiquing “literacy as a mechanism of citizenship that appears to reconcile inequality” can bring to light the “limitations of a model of citizenship disproportionately focused on participation” (9). Wan’s second chapter “Literacy Training, Americanization, and the Cultivation of the Productive Worker Citizen” further explains this understanding through an examination of literacy practices developed as part of mid 1910s through 1920s Americanization movements. These practices included such things as companies requiring immigrant employees to take English language and American citizenship classes with content that reinforced the American “boot-straps” mentality and sought to avoid unionization and communist leanings. Though such classes were presented as advancement opportunities, they actually reflected a “explicit shaping of the habits of citizenship” (“Literacy” 69) that reinforced the class divides many of the literacy students were seeking to overcome. Wan draws a parallel between her work and that of Catherine Prendergast saying that just as Prendergast asserts that equal legal rights to education do not always result in material equality in education, Wan argues that equal legal citizenship rights do not reflect equal material opportunity. Whereas Wan critiques the entanglement of literacy and citizenship, Prendergast examines and critiques the links between literacy and racial inequality. Prendergast’s “Introduction: The Tangled History of Literacy and Racial Justice” defines the “‘ideology’ of literacy” as “flawed but rhetorically seductive and seemingly deathless argument that literacy will guarantee equality of opportunity, moral growth, and financial security” (4). The concept of the ideology of literacy reflects Harvey Graff’s concept of “the literacy myth” as unsubstantiated belief in the ability of literacy to solve all societal problems. Throughout her introduction and in her essay “The Economy of Literacy: How the Supreme Court Stalled the Civil Rights Movement,” Prendergast critiques this view of literacy as an equalizer by examining how literacy has been situationally used by whites to disenfranchise African Americans. Prendergast reexamines several Supreme Court Cases, namely Brown, to display ways in which such cases reinforced rather than counter a white ownership of and control over literacy.