blog 3 … literacy surges past education

Personal Literacy Trends and Appreciations

 This prompt is quick and easy for me. My dad was a foster kid and my mom’s parents are from Mexico and essentially illiterate. Not to sell my grandparents short or anything, they taught themselves to read well enough later in life; it’s just that reading wasn’t a priority during my mother’s formative years. Growing up mine and my siblings exposure to literacy came through watching my parents read work material or some supplemental reading from the bible. Suffice it to say their children have had to find literacy on their own later in life … there I go selling my family short again … My mom did read us Dr. Suess books and the like before bed time when we were very young.

I do see how my family did set certain literacy appreciations and trends for me. The moral and ethical debates, as well as their rhetorical arguments, are a cornerstone of discussion (mostly argument) and literacy with my family.  This has formed the backbone of my interpretation of the rhetorical world around me and all the processes literacy entails.  It has served me well as it has helped me to adapt to literacy today and literacy today may best be measured by a person’s capacity to amalgamate new reading and writing practices in response to rapid social change (Brandt 651). For me literacy is first rhetorical, ethical then moral and in that order of importance. My inherited literacy tradition has gone a long way for me in my perception of the world around me and that is to say it has gone a long way for me in literacy and its enterprises.

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I’m gonna go off reservation now and try and make up for last week’s blog and try to combine it with a separate thread discussion in this week’s blog.

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 Literacy Surges Past Education

 So far in class we’ve learned that literacy can’t be narrowly defined as only the ability to read and write, rather it is the sum of our interaction with our environment. Literacy is transformative across ideologies, it is both macro and micro, both socially and culturally. We as a society need to figure out the future literacy “surge” so that literacy stacking – our inherited “lit” traditions – doesn’t inhibit as much as it enables. But why waste effort trying to enlighten ourselves to the rhetorical analysis of what literacy is where it applies to education? Brandt hopes “we can also begin to see how the role of the school in an advanced literate age can be reconceptualized to help students at all levels detect the residual, emergent, often conflicted contexts of literacy that form their world. (Brandt 666).” But wouldn’t it be more effective not to look at that many tangents and avenues of rhetorical analysis, through the lens of the bureaucratic nightmare that is EDUCATION?

In our advanced literate period we are required to have the ability to work the borders between tradition and change, and to have the ability to adapt, improvise and amalgamate  literacy (Brandt 660). Looking to “education” for ways of coping with literacy as it “surges” may be a flawed point of view; it relies on an institution that has historically valued antiquated systems for change and progressive thinking. How can we rely on the institution of education to formulate the interpretive opportunities of the complexities of literacies amalgamated past, present and future (Brandt 665)? Some may even go so far as to point out that “education” has never been innovative or supple enough to deal with changes in literacy. As a matter of fact, it usually takes turbulent social changes to accelerate new models of literacy into the social norm and those changes rarely come from education. These shifts in literacy almost always form with the rising and falling of social ideologies. That’s not to say that these enterprises aren’t part of the same process, it’s just that defining it and predicting it is specific to the goals of the institution of education and all the baggage that comes with.

Perhaps Brandt aspires to too lofty a goal when she asserts that literacy today may be best measured (by educators) by a person’s capacity to amalgamate new reading writing practices in response to rapid social change (Brandt 651). How can an institution influenced by federal, state, county and local authorities  hope to understand such virtuous analysis of a “literacy crisis”? Maybe it would be more effective to shed the idea that the institution of education will be the salvation of literacies verging conflict and to focus that idea elsewhere. It may be more conceivable to embrace the notion that understanding literacy comes down to an individual’s abilities, goals and aspirations. The cream does rise to the top, no? It could be that the most effective way to communicate the message of the changes and practices of literacies is not through the institution of education but rather to focus the message to individuals and the home … and the home is where it all begins.