Learning has its disadvantages.

Learning has it’s disadvantages; the first is that your friends look down on you for being a know-it-all. Second, they can’t believe it when you don’t have the answer to what rivers drain into what lake to make Niagara Falls, thus you lose at Trivial Pursuit.  So my goal is to have no friends. This has been going quite well until I started classes at Chico State. I have already met some really cool people. Little do they know i have my guard up. I don’t have every answer to every question, I even give the wrong answers so they know i am not “that guy.’

When we broke up into groups last week to discuss the reading i new that this was the time for me to come off as not being “that guy.” Autonomous literacy and Ideological literacy, i can talk some B.S. about that and the group will move on to someone else to get their ideas. Little did i know my B.S was “right”.  Right enough that everyone else thought I was that guy and applauded me into going for it.

Whenever I have a tough time with reading an article i usually find the biggest word and break it down. This week it was AUTONOMOUS.  I know what  means because at a very young age I asked my mother why my best friend was acting the way he was. “He always gets his way.” My mom said that is because he is autonomous. I asked what that means and she said, “look it up.” As she did with any word i didn’t understand. My mom can be quite truculent.

When it comes to autonomous literacy we found that like a mother-ship the leaders of this ideology tend to move into the learning community and share (force) their one way of learning. Like a ship in the night the people in charge offer literacy as a fruit tree of knowledge; what falls off gets learned and then they move on down the line. Ideological literacy is just the opposite with the same metaphor. The Mother(Teresa) ship comes to the community and hands out the fruit from the tree to those who need it. Some may need more than one type of fruit and more of it while others might just need the seeds and the seeds get planted and grow with the help of their sponsors.

If we could think of Autonomous literacy as the right wing conservative group; giving out just enough to get by while those who already have the knowledge flourish. Ideological literacy is the liberal group helping all of the community and the special needs of many. The problem arises however when  autonomous literacy is cycled throughout the community; there is one way to teach and this is a utopian ideal, however there can be no “one” way to teach. On the other hand, Ideological literacy requires many ways of teaching and it is near impossible to teach teachers to teach every student as an individual. So what do we do. I think the later is the Utopian ideal we should strive for. Knowing it can never truly be obtained, no great endeavor goes unnoticed and perhaps it can be morphed into the autonomous ideal over time. What needs to happened is literacy needs to be liberated from the old grey hair men in government who never taught in the first place. What i mean by liberation is that there needs to be a biological evolution; the dna of literacy has to be mutated to fit the masses in an individual communistic format rather than one size fits all.