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…