Chapman University

Chapman University Digital Commons

Education Faculty Articles and Research College of Educational Studies

1988

Culture or Canon? Critical Pedagogy and the

Politics of Literacy
Peter McLaren
Chapman University, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/education_articles

Recommended Citation
McLaren, P. (1988). Culture or canon? Critical pedagogy and the politics of literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 58(2): 213-234.

This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Educational Studies at Chapman University Digital Commons. It has
been accepted for inclusion in Education Faculty Articles and Research by an authorized administrator of Chapman University Digital Commons. For
more information, please contact [email protected].
Culture or Canon? Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Literacy
Comments
This review was originally posted in Harvard Educational Review, volume 58, issue 2, in 1988.

Copyright
Harvard Education Publishing Group

This book review is available at Chapman University Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/education_articles/

152
Culture or Canon? Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Literacy

PETER L. MCLAREN, Miami University, Ohio

LITERACY: READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD

by Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo.
South Hadley, M A : Bergin & Garvey, 1987. 184 pp. $12.95 (paper).

A major debate has emerged in the United States over the questions of what con­
stitutes literacy, who has access to it, and what values and practices are legitimated
by it. T h e parameters of this debate are no longer constrained by what it means
to be occupationally literate; rather, the more pressing question today is what kind
of knowledge learners must acquire in order to participate in society as active, in­
formed citizens. Literacy has ceased to be treated solely as a technical discourse
for entrance into the world of work. In fact, the use of the term has changed dra­
matically in recent years. Once restrictively defined as providing students with
specific technical skills related to reading, writing, and speaking, the term literacy
has also come to mean educating students to be culturally literate; that is, to be
bearers of certain meanings, values, and views.
That the concept of literacy has entertained nearly constant debate during re­
cent years is not surprising, given the various reactions to current reform efforts
which are attempting to bring "excellence" back to American education. In addi­
tion to generating antipathy among various groups of critics, these efforts have
yielded to an inexorable process of narrowing and technicizing the concept of liter­
acy. Within the last decade three positions have come to characterize the politics
and pedagogy of literacy. These positions generally break down into the following:
functional literacy, cultural literacy, and critical literacy. Functional literacy refers
primarily to the technical mastery of particular skills necessary for students to de­
code simple texts such as street signs, instruction manuals, or the front page of
a daily newspaper. Definitions of functional literacy vary, but generally include
the ability to read somewhere between the fourth- and eighth-grade levels on stan­
1
dardized reading tests. Cultural literacy refers to the acquisition of a broad range
of factors which accompany functional literacy, such as a familiarity with particu­
lar linguistic traditions or bodies of information. M o r e specifically, it means ac­
quiring a knowledge of selected works of literature and historical information nec­
essary for informed participation in the political and cultural life of the nation.
T w o radically different positions characterize cultural literacy. T h e first advances
the establishment of a cultural index or a cultural canon of literary works pre-

1
If one defines illiteracy as being able to read only the simplest texts and street signs, then about
27 million adults would be considered illiterate. If one includes the ability to read the local newspaper
or articles in digest magazines, then about 45 million adults would be classified as illiterate. If the
standards are closer to a high school level, then 72 million Americans would be classified as illiterate.
Adults who are functionally literate read somewhere between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. See
Jeanne S. Chall, Elizabeth Heron, and Ann Hilferty, "Adult Literacy: New and Enduring Problems,"
Phi Delta Kappan, 69 (1987), 190-196.

Harvard Educational Review Vol. 58 No. 2 May 1988

Copyright © by President and Fellows of Harvard College
0017-8055/88/0500-0213$01.25/0

213
Harvard Educational Review

scribed for all students and also insists upon a required form of English usage; the
second advocates using the language standards and cultural information students
bring into the classroom as legitimate and important constituents of learning.
Critical literacy, on the other hand, involves decoding the ideological dimensions
of texts, institutions, social practices, and cultural forms such as television and
film, in order to reveal their selective interests. T h e purpose behind acquiring this
type of literacy is to create a citizenry critical enough to both analyze and challenge
the oppressive characteristics of the larger society so that a more just, equitable,
and democratic society can be created. Each of these perspectives on literacy has
its exponents, proponents, and detractors; and each category has become a buzz­
word in the lexicon of the current debate over excellence in education.

Functional Literacy
Recent revelations by Jonathan K o z o l and others that the functionally and mar­
ginally illiterate population of the United States may now exceed 60 million has
provoked widespread concern both in the public domain and across the educa­
2
tional system. While this estimate has been the focus of some dispute among liter­
acy researchers, it remains the case that only about 4 million adults nationwide
are being helped through currently available literacy programs, including volun­
teer programs (such as Literacy Volunteers of America and Laubach Literacy
3
Volunteers) as well as competency-based and community-based programs. T o ­
gether, all federal, state, municipal, and private literacy programs in the United
4
States reach a maximum of 4 percent of the illiterate population. In an even less
salutary light, the current literacy crisis has helped heighten the moral panic — no
doubt fueled by a growing xenophobia — surrounding the rapidly expanding His­
panic population. A movement is now in progress, headed by former California
senator S. I. Hayakawa, to devalue bilingual education programs and to make
English the official language of the United States.
Mainstream theories of literacy conceive of being literate as possessing only that
requisite fund of knowledge — that privileged form of linguistic currency — neces­
sary for students to succeed materially in an industrialized capitalist society. T h i s
perspective still informs most school-based literacy programs across the United
States. In this view, the nonstandard literacies of minority groups and the poor
(that is, different dialects, nonstandard English) are regarded as deficits or depriv­
ations rather than differences. Some research suggests that many of today's illiter­
ates are dropouts of reading programs that demand strongly analytic/auditory
5
reading styles as distinct from whole-language approaches to teaching reading.

2
Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985), p. 4.
3
Chall, Heron, and Hilferty, "Adult Literacy," p. 192. For a comparison between the Laubach
and Freirean approaches, see Michael Holzman, "A Post-Freirean Model for Adult Literacy Educa­
tion," College English, 50 (1988), 177-189.
4
Kozol, Illiterate America, p. 5.
5
Marie Carbo, "Deprogramming Reading Failure: Giving Unequal Learners an Equal Chance,"
Phi Delta Kappan, 69 (Nov. 1987), 197-202. Colin Lankshear has undertaken an excellent critique of
literacy programs based on the model of functional literacy. Lankshear claims that conventional mod­
els of functional literacy are actually dysfunctional for the disadvantaged illiterate adult and functional
for those whose interests are best served by maintaining the economic, political, and cultural status
quo. His radical alternative model of functional literacy is very similar to the position of critical liter­
acy, although Lankshear prefers to keep the term "functional literacy" because it enjoys widespread

214
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

Cultural Literacy
Although approaches to literacy continually suffer the conflictual relationships of
opposing groups and theoretical perspectives, a more critical consensus on what
literacy means is beginning to take shape. Theorists are starting to acknowledge
the difficulty in separating cultural literacy from reading and writing in general.
In fact, some argue that reading and writing are relatively futile and empty exer­
6
cises unless accompanied by at least some form of cultural knowledge, For example, Ivan
Illich has recently begun to theorize about the relationship between "scribal liter­
acy," the ability to read and write, and "lay literacy," the set of pervasive compe­
7
tencies and cultural knowledge that is required to participate in a literate society.
In her 1985 American Educational Studies Association Butts Lecture entitled
"Literacy and Learning in the M a k i n g of Citizens," Shirley Brice Heath empha­
sizes the indissoluable link between literacy, context, and meaning. She notes:

Unless accompanied with cultural knowledge, personal drive, political motiva­

tion, or economic opportunity, literacy does not lead the writer to make the essen­
tial leap from literacy to being literate — from knowing what the words say to
understanding what they mean. Readers make meaning by linking the symbols
on the page with real-world knowledge and then considering what the text means
for generating new ideas and actions not explicitly written or "said" in the text.
The transformation of literacy skills into literate behaviors and ways of thinking
depends on a community of talkers who make the text mean something. For most
of history, such literate communities have been elite groups, holding themselves
8
and their knowledge and power apart from the masses.

A m o n g the exponents of "cultural literacy," two polar positions seem apparent

that reflect both liberal and conservative orientations in the cultural literacy per­
spective. T h e "prescriptivists" argue that students' success in the North American
marketplace depends upon their successful entrance into the academy. This gener­
ally means being taught from a prescribed canon of literary works and acquiring
a standard form of English. T h e "pluralists," on the other hand, argue for the legit­
imacy of a broader range of discursive practices which reflect more closely the lan­
guage practices, values, and interests of racially and economically diverse groups
9
of students. T h e pluralists attempt to affirm and legitimize the cultural universes,
knowledge, and language practices that students bring into the classroom. Both
these orientations reflect an understanding of literacy which incorporates, along
with the mastery of technical skill, the explicit recognition of the importance of
some form of shared cultural knowledge.

support and financial affirmation. Based on the ideas of Freire, Lankshear's model is grounded in
a dialectic between literacy and empowerment that is linked to a transformation of dehumanizing
social structures. See Colin Lankshear, "Humanizing Functional Literacy: Beyond Utilitarian Neces­
sity," Educational Theory, 36 (1986), 375-387.
6
Shirley Brice Heath, "Literacy and Learning in the Making of Citizens," 1985 Butts Lecture. In
Civic Education, Pluralism and Literacy, published jointly by AESA News and Comment and The Center
for the Studies of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, August, 1986, p. 16.
7
Ivan Illich, "A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy," Interchange, 18 (1987), 9-22.
8
Heath, "Literacy and Learning," p. 16.
9
Patricia Bizzell, "Cultural Literacy," unpublished paper. I am greatly indebted to this paper for
providing me with some of the primary categories used in my analysis. A published version of this
paper has recently appeared. See Patricia Bizzell, "Arguing about Literacy," College English, 50 (1988),
141-153.

215
Harvard Educational Review

Figures most frequently associated with the recent debate over "what every
American needs to know" — E. D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, and Secretary of Educa­
tion William J. Bennett — have raised the stakes appreciably with respect to the
10
kind of knowledge students should be taught, and in what manner. T h e i r widely
publicized positions on literacy and the virtues of higher learning focus directly
on which knowledge should be dispensed to students, which virtues should be re­
flected in student character and behavior, and who should be the credentializing
agents for this process. Bennett's ideological recipe for a national curriculum re­
flects the positions of both Hirsch and Bloom. In his attack on the fragmented cur­
riculum, Hirsch argues for cultural uniformity — a "traditional literate culture"
consisting of a common prescribed content which will supposedly give students
access to mainstream economic and political life (and thus by implication become
a key avenue to social and economic justice for minority students).
Bloom's concept of literacy is more sweeping. Unlike Hirsch, who incorporates
information from both mainstream and elite cultures, Bloom seeks to instill,
among the worthiest of students, high-status knowledge based on Platonic princi­
ples and virtues which treat knowledge as pristine, transhistorical, universal, and
context free. What Hirsch, on the other hand, would like to prescribe for present
and future generations of students (despite his claim to be a "descriptivist" and not
a "prescriptivist") is cultural information based on some 4,700 items which include
facts, dates of battles, authors of books, figures from Greek mythology, and the
names of past presidents of the United States. These qualify not so much as infor­
mation from elite culture but as items familiar to "literate" Americans, although
authorities may cavil with respect to which particular pieces of information should
be included in Hirsch's index.
While the work of Hirsch and Bloom contains many ideological affinities, it is
as difficult to imagine what a common curriculum would look like based on their
writings as it is to imagine the game of Trivial Pursuit being played in Plato's Re­
public. What the work of Hirsch and Bloom means for prescriptivists like Bennett
is first of all specifying the shared prior knowledge necessary for students to succeed
in the discourse community of literate Americans (for Bloom this becomes the dis­
course community within the hallowed halls of the academy) and then developing
a pedagogical strategy for teaching this knowledge (preferably codified in texts)
prescriptively to those who are assumed to be culturally deficient. T h e prescriptivists'
call for a nationally endorsed cultural canon — a "republic of letters" of sorts that
would be capable of encoding our culture with a selective history, world view, and
epistemology — is tantamount to calling for the construction of a national identity.

10
The works of these individuals include E. D. Hirsch, Jr., "Restoring Cultural Literacy in the
Early Grades," Educational Leadership, 45 (December 1987/January 1988), 63-70; E. D. Hirsch, Jr.,
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); E. D.
Hirsch, Jr., "Cultural Literacy," American Scholar, 52 (1982-83), 159-169; E. D. Hirsch, Jr., "Culture
and Literacy," Journal of Basic Writing, 3 (1980), 27-47; E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Philosophy of Composition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How
Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1987); and the views of William Bennett, which were published when he was chairman of
the National Endowment for the Humanities and which were summarized in "'To Reclaim a Legacy':
Text of Report on Humanities in Education," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 1984, pp.
16-21. Closely resembling Bennett's view on cultural literacy is What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (New
York: Harper & Row, 1988), written by Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, Jr., which follows the lead
of E. D. Hirsch in substituting the mindless teaching of skills with the mindless teaching of content.
See also the review by Deborah Meier and Florence Miller in The Nation, January 9, 1988, pp. 25-27.

216
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

Accordingly, students become accredited as culturally literate to the degree that

they accept this national identity inscribed on the tablet of Western high culture.

Critical Literacy
Lately some participants in the literacy debate have become critical of the prevail­
ing conceptualizations of what it means to be literate and have begun vigorously
to challenge the previously sacrosanct positions. These critics are not the inevit­
able dissenting minority in any discipline but include many recognized leaders in
the field, such as Paulo Freire, Harvey Graff, Kenneth G o o d m a n , Yetta Good­
man, and Henry Giroux. As the theoretical limitations of the old functional and
cultural literacy models become more evident, the focus on formal standards of
English is giving way to an exploration of the social construction of knowledge and
the ideological processes involved in the reading of texts. In recent years literacy
critics have become much more aware of the centrality of "relations of power" to
the domain of literacy, which would not normally have been included under the
rubric of conventionally defined "politics." What this suggests is that if the process
of becoming literate is, in large part, a struggle for voice and the reclamation of
one's history, then there is also a critical sense in which literacy itself must be polit­
11
ically defined.
At a time when popularizers of cultural literacy are prescribing a literary canon
to pry open the "closed minds" of an American youth putatively on the path to in­
tellectual and moral decline, radical critics, armed with a welter of ethnographic
evidence, are attempting to draw our attention to the gendered, racial, and socio­
economic contexts of literacy and the challenge that these new conceptualizations
12
represent. T h i s challenge, which is presently being undertaken on the dual fronts
of pedagogy and popular culture, has manifested itself as a struggle over what
counts as legitimate educational knowledge, who has the power to define it as
such, and the instructional means by which it should be taught to learners.

11
Simply labeling one in five American adults functionally illiterate masks the fact that a large pro­
portion of these individuals are not fluent in English, and that more than half of them are women.
Literacy in this view is treated as though it occurs in a vacuum. Kathleen Rockhill writes that main­
stream literacy programs, which emphasize reading and writing in the dominant language, conceal
under the banner of equality the ethnocentrism, racism, and sexism inherent in literacy policies.
Thus, the presumed neutrality of becoming literate enshrouds the interests of entrenched groups.
Rockhill reports that within most literacy approaches learners are treated as the same, but symbolic­
ally are dichotomized as literate or illiterate — that is, learners or non-learners — and literacy is estab­
lished as an isolated, measurable, uniform "thing," a skill or commodity that can be acquired if one
only has the necessary motivation to participate in learning opportunities or literacy programs. That
is, literacy is treated as though it is outside the social and political relations, ideological practices, and
symbolic meaning structures in which it is embedded. See Kathleen Rockhill, "Gender, Language
and the Politics of Literacy," British Journal of Sociology of Education, 8 (1987), 153-167. See also
Kathleen Rockhill, "Literacy as Threat/Desire: Longing to be SOMEBODY," unpublished paper.
12
Many important advances in the field of literacy over the last decade have been achieved primar­
ily by researchers working in discourse linguistics and the ethnography of communication. As a result
of their efforts, it has become clear that educators can no longer ignore the gap between formal school
literacy and the oral tradition of the student's family, home, and community. See J. Cook-Gumperz,
ed., The Social Construction of Literacy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Adrian T. Ben­
nett, "Discourses of Power, the Dialectics of Understanding, the Power of Literacy," Journal of Educa­
tion, 165 (1983), 53-64; and Michelle Sola and Adrian T. Bennett, "The Struggle for Voice: Literacy
and Consciousness in an East Harlem School," Journal of Education, 167 (1985), 88-110. See also
James Donald, Language, Literacy and Schooling (London: Open University Press, in press).

217
Harvard Educational Review

Those who argue for critical literacy maintain that an uncritical enthusiasm for
making individuals functionally literate conceals the substantive issue of what it
means to be truly literate behind the imperatives of linguistic mastery. To couch
the process of literacy mainly in terms of linguistic competency is to remove the
process from the varied context in which literacy is achieved — a context that in­
cludes the experiences students bring to the reading act, as well as the contingen­
cies of history, culture, and politics. Exponents of critical literacy generally regard
the prescriptivist models of cultural literacy to be a form of cultural imposition
undertaken by the guardians of academic discourse communities and the domi­
nant social classes with which they are associated. Advocates of critical literacy
avoid espousing a view of cultural knowledge in which meaning derives from a
unitary and fixed essence — inherited knowledge and formulations which have
been sedimented by the impersonal force of history into the wisdom of the ages.
Rather, they conceptualize the production of cultural knowledge as a struggle over
competing discourses, the history of which has been swathed in ambiguities and
contradictions. In this view, the value of cultural and literary texts resides not in
their collective currency as the heralded virtues of society or disinterested ideals
of truth, but in the manner in which they have been constructed out of a web of
relationships shaped by different gendered, racial, economic, and historical con­
texts. It is wrong to assume that individual women and men from different social
classes read texts in a similar manner, just as it is wrong to assume that the context
of reading a work of literature remains undifferentiated through time. A s histori­
cally produced subjects, readers of texts are governed by different social and ideo­
logical formations which may or may not correspond to the formations present
when the text was originally produced. Critical literacy focuses, therefore, on the
interests and assumptions that inform the generation of knowledge itself. F r o m
this perspective all texts, written, spoken, or otherwise represented, constitute
ideological weapons capable of enabling certain groups to solidify their power
through acts of linguistic hegemony. This can be seen in the ways in which main­
stream schooling has stressed the cultural capital of certain speech communities
that make up the dominant culture. It is to the issue of the school's complicity in
maintaining a "culture of silence" in which inequality is produced among groups
on the basis of race, class, and gender that the work of Paulo Freire becomes so
significant for American audiences.

Critical Literacy: A Freirean Perspective

Literacy: Reading the Word and the World is the third book by Paulo Freire to appear
in the United States in the past three years. It is the second book translated by,
and with the participation of, Donaldo Macedo, although Macedo's contribution
is much greater in the present book.
Freire's work has become almost synonymous with the project of literacy. Born
in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, a large port city and capital of the northeastern state of
Pernambuco, Freire spent his early life in poverty, as underdevelopment and
worldwide economic crisis of 1929 saw his family lose its middle-class status and
be forced into poverty. Experiencing firsthand the listlessness and apathy of the
poor, Freire soon realized that the education system was a primary vehicle in
maintaining this "culture of silence." Dedicating his life to the struggle against pov­
erty, Freire spent nearly three decades exploring how the culture and conscious­
ness of illiterate peasants have been shaped by the language and values of the "col­
onizer," or the dominant culture.

218
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

As Professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Recife in the early

1960s, Freire worked with peasants in the Brazilian Northeast during that coun-
try's national literacy campaign. A t that time he evolved a theory of literacy which
is based on the conviction that every human being is capable of critically engaging
the world in a dialogical encounter with others. In 1964 Freire was arrested, jailed,
and later sent into exile after the military seized control of the Brazilian govern-
ment. His theory of literacy and empowerment culminated in 1970 in the release
of his now classic treatise, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which stressed building upon
the learners' indigenous language as the basis for developing reading and writing.
Subsequent years were tumultuous and productive: a five-year stay in Chile as a
UNESCO consultant with the Agrarian Reform T r a i n i n g and Research Institute
in programs for adult education; an appointment in 1969 as Fellow of Harvard
University's Center for the Study of Development and Social Change; a move to
Switzerland in the same year as consultant and Special Advisor in Education to
the Office of Education of the W o r l d Council of Churches, where he developed
literacy programs for Tanzania and Guinea-Bissau; and the establishment of the
Instituto de Acción Cultural in Geneva. Freire's influence was strongly felt in the
literacy campaigns of Nicaragua, C u b a , Portugal, Chile, and Angola.
T o d a y his influence extends beyond the domain of literacy and includes devel-
opments in social work, education, sociology, participatory research, and critical
pedagogy. Freire returned to Brazil in June of 1980, after an amnesty was de-
clared in 1979. H e is now Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Pontifícia
Universidade Católíca de São Paulo and the public Universidade de Campinas in
São Paulo.
T h e participation of Donaldo Macedo, a Cape V e r d e a n - b o r n sociolinguist who
now teaches in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts at
Boston, brings a complementary and critical voice both to the theoretical and
practical aspects of Freirean pedagogy. In particular, Macedo's familiarity with
the critical sociological tradition in education helps to clarify some of Freire's posi-
tions on the pedagogical implications and applications of his work. In addition,
Macedo's own brand of radical educational politics assists in both situating and
extending the more recent advances of Freire's work within the critical educational
tradition in the United States.
A n n Berthoff's pithy foreword provides an illuminating discussion of the philo-
sophical roots of Freire's pedagogy, which she terms "a pedagogy of knowing." Fol-
lowing this is a theoretically detailed preface by Henry A . Giroux, which could
have functioned equally as an afterword, since it extends many of the ideas dis-
cussed throughout the book. A longtime exponent of Freire's work in the United
States, Giroux establishes a critical context that provides an invaluable conceptual
basis for engaging the text. H e provides readers with three primary — and in many
ways original — categories for approaching the concept of literacy: literacy as cul-
tural politics; literacy as liberating remembrance; and literacy as narrative.
Giroux's use of the category "cultural politics" draws attention to the social, cul-
tural, political, and economic dimensions of everyday life and illustrates how these
must become the major contexts for both language acquisition and usage. T h e
concept of "liberating remembrance" highlights the fundamental importance of
history to the process of becoming critically literate. History, argues Giroux, can
provide educators with the possibility of establishing both a referent for and a cri-
tique of injustice and oppression. Critical readings of history can enable students
to recover and reconstruct the "radical potential of memory," investigating histor-
ical sources of human suffering so that they can never be repeated. Such "liberat-

219
Harvard Educational Review

ing remembrance" will also enable the educator to seize whatever images of hope
these events might offer to the present. Giroux's third category — literacy as a form
of narrative — draws attention to the fact that literacy is always about somebody's
story. As a story by somebody and for somebody, knowledge is invariably informed
by a set of underlying interests that structure how a particular story is told through
such factors as the organization of knowledge, social relations and cultural values,
reader reception, and forms of assessment. As a form of narrative, critical literacy
becomes a struggle over whose "stories" will prevail as a legitimate object of learn­
ing and analysis. T h e conceptual framework Giroux provides helps to enlarge the
range of critical possibilities for examining Freire and Macedo's work.
T h e book itself takes a somewhat disjointed form: three extensive dialogues be­
tween Macedo and Freire; a letter written by Freire to M a r i o C a b r a l , Minister
of Education of Guinea-Bissau; a portion of the texts of Practice to Learn and other
workbooks prepared for the "Culture Circles" of Sao T o m e and Principe; two es­
says by Freire; and an essay coauthored by Freire and Macedo. T h e generative
themes involve the act of reading, an updated version of a previously published
article; adult literacy and popular libraries, adapted from a talk Freire presented
at the Eleventh Brazilian Congress of Library Economy and Documentation in
1982; rethinking literacy, which takes the form of a dialogue between Freire and
Macedo; literacy in action, a detailed and practical exposition by Freire of his
"Popular Culture Notebooks"; a critical exchange between Freire and Macedo to
clarify Freire's controversial involvement in the literacy campaign in Guinea-
Bissau; a dialogue between Freire and Macedo on literacy in the United States;
and a coauthored essay in which Freire and Macedo link the concept of literacy
to that of critical pedagogy.
Positioning Freire and Macedo's work within the foregoing perspectives on liter­
acy highlights some of the problematic assumptions which inform them. More­
over, it sheds some critical light on current approaches in the United States de­
signed to rescue the nation's "illiterates" through the establishment of a requisite
cultural knowledge for all who wish to participate as American citizens. A fre­
quently enunciated thesis of Freire and Macedo states that approaches to literacy,
regardless of the country in which they take place, must constitute more than sim­
ply the "alphabetization" of the so-called illiterate student. That children have lin­
guistic and communicative skills outside the school which often go unrecognized
in the classroom is the first consideration that must be addressed in any critical
literacy program. N o text can be taught to students in antiseptic isolation from
their life and culture. Freire underscores this point when he remarks:

If adult literacy was once treated and realized in an authoritarian way, centered
on the magical understanding of the word, a word bestowed by the educator on
the illiterate, and if the texts generally offered students once hid much more than
they revealed of reality, now literacy as an act of knowledge, as a creative act and
as a political act, is an effort to read the world and the word. Now it is no longer
possible to have the text without context. (p. 43)

Freire and Macedo significantly enrich our understanding of literacy by helping

us essentially to see it as socially constructed forms of cultural and communicative
practices. Viewing literacy in this manner shifts our attention away from the dom­
inant concept of literacy as the ability to read, write, and speak. Instead, by dem­
onstrating how culturally different minorities use oral and literate modes to inter-

220
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

act in the home, community, and classroom, they bring us closer to understanding
literacy as a form of cultural politics.
Stressing that the language of subordinate groups is as linguistically rule-gov­
erned and sophisticated as the language of dominant groups, Freire notes: "What
they [sociolinguists] show is that, scientifically, all languages are valid, systematic,
rule-governed systems, and that the inferiority/superiority distinction is a social
phenomenon" (p. 53). However, Freire and Macedo are quick to point out that
regardless of the equality of language forms, the notion that cultures are simply
different but equal is a gross mystification perpetuated by dominant theories of lit­
eracy. W e are constantly reminded throughout the book that subordinate groups
are located within social relations marked by the unequal distribution of power.
Since the dominant culture generally functions in the interests of certain groups
over others on the basis of race, age, class, and gender, subordinate groups are
often denied access to the power, knowledge, and resources that could allow them
to become critically literate. Macedo draws a parallel between this aspect of Amer­
ican society and public schooling, remarking that "When curriculum designers ig­
nore important variables such as social-class differences, when they ignore the in­
corporation of the subordinate cultures' values in the curriculum, and when they
refuse to accept and legitimize the students' language, their actions point to . . .
inflexibility, insensitivity, and rigidity. . ." (p. 124). Linguistic- and racial-minor­
ity students are the hardest hit by the educational system, which has systematically
evaluated their school performance and revealed it to be inferior to that of main­
stream students in English. This has been done, however, without fully consider­
ing "their struggle against racism, educational tracking, and the systematic nega­
tion of their histories" (p. 154). This dilemma has been brought about, according
to Freire and Macedo, because of a general failure by American educators to link
school performance to the structural relations of the wider society:

. . . Educators, including the present secretary of education, William J. Bennett,

fail to understand that it is through multiple discourses that students generate
meaning of their everyday social contexts. Without understanding the meaning
of their immediate social reality, it is most difficult to comprehend their relations
with the wider society. (p. 154)

Mainstream approaches to literacy, which too often concentrate on the sheer

mechanics of reading and writing, fail to take seriously enough the learner's socio-
cultural context — his or her own social reality — in which meaning is actively con­
structed. A l l too frequently the social reality of the learner is assumed to corre­
spond to reality as it is defined by the dominant culture — to what Freire refers to
13
as the "schooling class." Speaking on this issue, Freire comments:
13
Donald, Language, Literacy and Schooling. See also Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren, "Teacher
Education and the Politics of Democratic Life: Beyond the Reagan Agenda in the Era of 'Good
Times,'" in Schools as Conduits: Educational Policymaking During the Reagan Years, ed. Carol Camp Yeakey
and Gladys Styles Johnson (New York: Praeger, in press); Peter McLaren, "No Light But Rather
Darkness Visible: Language and the Politics of Criticism," Curriculum Inquiry, in press. It should be
made clear here that even the more radical theories of resistance, while romanticizing the culture of
the poor without considering how it also has been colonized by the dominant ideology replete with
its differences and contradictions, have failed to analyze how power is lived in everyday, practical
experience. Theories of resistance often miss the connection between literacy and sexuality and the
manner in which sexual domination reproduced as literacy is lived through the gendered practices
of the family and society (Rockhill, "Gender, Language and the Politics of Literacy"; see also Rock-
hill, "Literacy as Threat/Desire").

221
Harvard Educational Review

This large number of people [in the United States] who do not read and write and
who were expelled from school do not represent a failure of the schooling class;
their expulsion reveals the triumph of the schooling class. In fact, this misreading
of responsibility reflects the schools' hidden curriculum. (p. 121)

Freire goes on to interpret the so-called "illiteracy" among students as their reac­
tion "to a curriculum and other material conditions in schools that negate their his­
tories, cultures, and day-to-day experiences" (p. 121). H e explains that illiteracy,
as it is treated within the dominant perspective, refers to reading and writing skills
which are inadequate to the task of carrying out efficiently and productively the
actions required by dominant social groups to secure established social relations
of production. Potential labor power is therefore wasted among "illiterates," and
this adversely affects the economic and technological expansion of the wider soci­
ety. Freire and Macedo consider this dominant view of illiteracy to pose a real
threat to democracy, since the possibilities for making choices and intervening in
reality are all but foreclosed when the social, political, and economic consequences
of reading and writing are tied to the logic of the marketplace. T h e dominant
model of literacy not only ignores the learner's creative capacity but also encour­
ages a passive acceptance of the status quo. On the contrary, critical literacy al­
ways implies a political reading of the world, accompanied by a transformation
of the oppressive relations which constitute that world. In a powerfully moving re­
sponse to a question posed by Macedo, Freire states:

Your question reminds me of my dream of a different society, one in which saying

the word is a fundamental right and not merely a habit, in which saying the word
is the right to become part of the decision to transform the world. To read the
word that one says in this perspective presupposes the reinvention of today's soci­
ety. The reinvention of society, on the other hand, requires the reinvention of
power. (p. 55)

Critical Literacy and the C a n o n

When placed beside Freire and Macedo's conception of critical literacy, the flaws
in the prescriptivists' positions become more obvious. For instance, the arguments
for the establishment of a literary canon fail to address the ways in which dominant
texts constitute an articulation of the societies that produced them. That is, those
in favor of teaching a canon of prescribed works rarely draw attention to the im­
portance of understanding the ideological dimensions of such works — an under­
standing which challenges the interests and values of the societies in which these
works were generated. Read collectively, the arguments of the prescriptivists
sound like a rallying cry to bring back a bogus past in which teachers were re­
quired to act "with stature" and students slavishly venerated school escutcheons,
crests, cups, honor boards, badges, pennants, and school ties — the standard sup­
porting insignia during the days when M r . Gradgrind cracked you on the knuckles
for failing to memorize your ten lines of Cicero.
Strands of elite Western culture, those that encode primarily the triumph of
White males, constitute a significant portion of this canon. Culture in this view
is presented as a sacred pool of cultural information — a cultural index, if you
will — the mastery of which will usher the student into the forum of national liter­
acy. While prescriptivists consider prior knowledge important, just as pluralists
do, prescriptivists tend not to acknowledge the social contexts which shape this

222
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

prior knowledge. Prescriptivists who favor the development of a national canon

of literary works in higher education are more likely to identify with Bloom's po­
sition over that of Hirsch. Bloom's perspective tends to naturalize among subordi­
nate groups the idea that the classic works of literature are not only constitutive
of a high status incompatible with the social standing of those groups but partake
of a certain quality of understanding for the most part inaccessible to their "closed
minds"; such high-status knowledge is therefore better off left to be consumed by
those students who have "earned" entrance to the top Ivy League schools. In a sim­
ilar fashion, Bloom's perspective reinforces the idea among privileged groups that
the classics bear a natural allegiance to their more culturally nourished, inherently
superior, and vastly more "open" minds.
T h e most compelling argument in favor of this canon is its harkening back to
the civilizing influence of the Great Tradition, much like the clarion call sounded
by the Leavisites throughout the pages of their journal, Scrutiny, and in their valor­
ization of the works of Austen, Eliot, James, C o n r a d , and Lawrence. Such a
yearning for past virtue may produce a temporary surge of adrenalin in those who
"man" the ivory towers of contemporary America, but ultimately rings hollow for
those who hold that great literature should have emancipatory social consequences
and be able to empower individuals to redress the structural inequalities that
plague the social order. T h e argument which claims that a return to the Great
Tradition will re-civilize illiterate America and purge it of the dross accumulated
by the current cultural barbarism is contradicted by the pretensions which struc­
ture its own discourse — pretensions which lead us to believe that literature can
transcend the forces of history, material relations, and the multiplicity of responses
that it evokes in its readers. In Bloom's quest for a literary canon, knowledge is
monumentalized, sanctified, and held up self-consciously and reverently as the
guardian of those souls seeking virtue and those minds in search of eternal wis­
dom. Bloom's agenda for educational reform asserts the contradiction between
what is and what should be based on a romantic distortion of what once was; on
the other hand, Freire and Macedo build their case for educational reform by seek­
ing Utopian possibilities within the social forms of the present historical juncture
based on what could be, while at the same time challenging the oppressive charac­
teristics of those social forms.
This literary canon will always remain a form of cultural invasion as long as the
interests which inform it are not uncovered to reveal their political locus, their real
social and ideological weight. A s long as knowledge is posited as eternal wisdom,
educators will be discouraged from becoming self-reflective about the internal as­
sumptions which legitimate such knowledge. T h i s canon also implies a pedagogy
of submission. F r o m the prescriptivists' perspective, little is relevant outside the
strictures of the required curriculum. F r o m a Freirean position, this approach ex­
tinguishes independent thinking and critical human action. W e are left with a tra­
ditional discourse dressed up for the current generation and prescribed without a
precise knowledge of the rules of its own formation.
While prescriptivists argue that the cultural heritage of the United States should
be taken seriously, they do so in a way that conceals its socially derivative status
and cloaks the selective interests which this inherited agenda serves in the mantle
of eternal principles of justice, equality, and fraternity. T h e y fail to acknowledge
that ideology shadows the steps of all knowledge — inherited or not. In other
words, they fail to take into account the relationship between knowledge and
power. This failing is readily apparent in the epistemological premises set forth

223
Harvard Educational Review

in the work of E . D. Hirsch. Here knowledge is equivalent to sharing a body of

information, and teaching is reduced to transmitting this information. Hirsch's
view of how students become culturally literate reifies culture as a museum of
events frozen in time and shrouded in the classical quest for permanence. Peda­
gogy in this view is reduced to sharing the "facts," and the role of the teacher be­
comes that of the curator of the national heritage. Rarely are attempts made to
destabilize the reified conceptualizations of cultural "facts" or to defamiliarize the
domesticating myths which often serve to legitimate existing relations of power
and privilege in the larger social order. Culture in this view becomes essentialized
outside the forces of power and history rather than analyzed as a fluid and contes­
tatory site where power works to favor certain forms of knowledge and where a
multiplicity of discourses war for dominance. In order to draw attention to this
relationship between knowledge and power, Freire poses the following questions:
"infavor of whom and what (and thus against whom and what) do we promote educa­
tion? A n d in favor of whom and what do we develop political activity?" (p. 38). O n
this matter, Freire is unwavering:

Only those who have power . . . can define what is correct or incorrect. Only
those who have power can decide what constitutes intellectualism. Once the intel­
lectual parameters are set, those who want to be considered intellectuals must
meet the requirements of the profile dictated by the elite class. To be intellectual
one must do exactly what those with the power to define intellectualism do. (p.
122)

Hirsch's argument for the cognitive superiority of standard English, which attri­
butes intellectual advancement to the formal structure of the symbol system,
steadfastly ignores the social situatedness and ideological nature of language. That
is, he avoids attending to the cultural and political significance attached to master­
ing dominant discourses. Macedo points out that different English dialects, such
as Black English, "decode different world views" (p. 127) and that "the semantic
value of specific lexical items belonging to black English differs radically, in some
cases, from the reading derived from the standard, dominant dialect" (p. 127).
While affirming Black English does not, in Freire's words, "preclude the need to
acquire proficiency in the linguistic code of the dominant group," it does mean
that Black English can become, in Macedo's terms, "a powerful tool demystifying
the distorted reality prepackaged for them by the dominant curriculum" (p. 128).
Whereas Hirsch believes the information processing of standard English is neces­
sary to be able to transcend cultural and historical contingencies, Freire and M a ­
cedo understand literacy to inhere in the sociopolitical context of the subjects
themselves. Freire makes this clear when he suggests that educators in the United
States "need to use their students' cultural universe as a point of departure, en­
abling students to recognize themselves as possessing a specific and important cul­
tural identity" (p. 127). In a similiar manner, works of literature cannot be de­
14
tached from their social origins. What Freire and Macedo take seriously, and

14
The problem, as some critics see it, is not with the idea of preserving our cultural heritage, a
surely laudable end in itself, but with preserving a heritage which is too homogeneous and narrow
in scope. As John Sisk notes: "We are confronted once again with the question of whether it is more
characteristic of Americans to fear that they are losing their heritage, or to fear that the heritage they
are supposed to be afraid of losing has been too narrowly constructed." See John P. Sisk, "What Is
Necessary," Salmagundi, 72 (Fall 1986), 145.
The narrowness of vision inscribed in this view of the canon stems, in part, from the uncritical as­
sumption that humanistic texts are — and should be — essentially ideologically neutral. Robert Scholes

224
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

prescriptivists do not, is the means by which history has granted certain texts
canonical status and excluded the local cultural canons of subjugated groups. In
other words, history is often written by the powerful, and the literary texts most
likely to be found on a list of prescribed works are those which rarely threaten the
social and economic stability of the established order. Works by writers who have
been marginalized because they happen to be female or members of minority
groups, or works that constitute political perspectives inhospitable to the dominant
culture, are not likely to be admitted to the national canon. T h e text, from the
perspective of a critical literacy, never ceases to be open to the world or to history.
Even purportedly high culture is shot through with history and steeped in the
15
meanings that the dominant culture has given it.
A n y perspective which advocates the incontestable superiority of the Great
Books, in which teachers are required to transmit the praiseworthy aspects of our
cultural heritage, is inherently problematic from a Freirean standpoint. Such a
strident, demanding manifesto rests on the neoclassical notion that culture exists
as a receptacle for ideas and somehow "contains" knowledge (as distinct from the
concept that knowledge is socially constructed). Granted, to deny students access
to the great intellectual and aesthetic works our culture has to offer is a grave injus­
tice. But it is important to recognize that great works do not speak for themselves.
T o claim that they do is to argue erroneously that they transcend history and the
contextual specificity of the discourses which generated them and to additionally

criticizes William Bennett for being upset that the humanities are sometimes used by educators to
present certain social perspectives. Scholes writes:

He [Bennett] wants the classroom to be exciting and value free, and he believes the great
humanistic texts to be exciting and value free also, as if Dante, Virgil, Karl Marx and
T. S. Eliot (to name four from his list of classics) were ideological innocents, sharing a com­
mon humanistic view of the world. Mr. Bennett is not innocent either, and nowhere is this
more apparent than in his taking the hotly debated question of the ideological component
of humanistic texts as a matter already settled to the effect that they have none — or if they
do it should not influence our regard for them. (Robert Scholes, "Aiming a Canon at the
Curriculum," Salmagundi, 72 [Fall 1986], 110.)

In his call for a return to a classics-oriented core curriculum for the universities, Bennett has re­
cently criticized scholars who are trying to include works by women and members of minority groups
into the canon as "trendy lightweights." (See The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 1988, pp.
1, 16.) Of course, Bennett's concept of the canon, as Rockhill points out, is also linked to his drive
to establish "moral literacy" as a fundamental teaching of schools and colleges. The argument being
levelled at the exponents of the illiberal canon by critics such as Scholes is not so much a greater call
for more relevance (for example, the inclusion of folk culture or popular culture) as much as it is a
call for rendering official culture problematic; that is, they are concerned not with the canon itself
(although they would like to see it broadened to include works by subjugated groups such as women
and minority writers) but with the pedagogical strategy used to teach the canon. See reference to Ben­
nett in the New York Times, September 30, 1986, p. 25, as cited in Rockhill, "Gender, Language and
the Politics of Literacy," p. 157.
15
Patricia Bizzell, "Arguing about Literacy," College English, 50 (1988), 141-153. According to Biz­
zell, Hirsch believes that the academic canon "has been granted by history the power to transcend
and hence to control local canons" (p. 147); furthermore, "Hirsch assumes that history has granted
the academic canon the right to exercise this power over other cultures, through establishing canonical
ways of thinking and of using language, canonical values, verbal styles, and mindsets as the 'most
important' to our national culture" (p. 147). In adopting a deterministic view of history, Hirsch's use
of the term "history" is reduced to "a cover term, concealing not only the process whereby certain texts
achieve canonical status but also the process whereby attitudes towards the very existence of any
canon, and its function in society, become ingrained" (p. 148).

225
 Harvard Educational Review

argue that these works deserve to be universally consumed regardless of the partic­
ular characteristics of the students whom the curriculum is intended to serve. T h e
prescriptivists do not seriously consider the question of whose interests, values,
and stories are affirmed and legitimated by the canon. F r o m Freire and Macedo's
point of view, such an approach to cultural literacy is sectarian and paternalistic,
and represents a form of cultural domination in which the socially constitutive na­
ture of both readers and texts is all but ignored. This non-ideological view of liter­
acy, which presents knowledge as inexorably given and self-justified by its aca­
demic valorization through the ages, becomes a "magical view" of the written word
based on its status as ideologically uncontaminated information. Freire under­
scores this position in the following passage:

To avoid misinterpretation of what I'm saying, it is important to stress that my

criticism of the magical view of the written word does not mean that I take an irre­
sponsible position on the obligation we all have — teachers and students — to read
the classic literature in a given field seriously in order to make the texts our own
and to create the intellectual discipline without which our practice as teachers and
students is not viable. (p. 34)

What is disquieting in the prescriptivists' position is that the high-status knowl­

edge of classic literary works becomes the only kind of knowledge deemed immut­
able and sacred enough to warrant its inclusion in the curriculum. T h e subjugated
knowledge of economically disadvantaged groups, women, and minorities is insis­
tently denigrated in the prescriptivists' view of what should be taught, how it
16
should be taught, and to whom. For instance, in Bloom's sanctified universe it
would be scandalous to include in the pantheon of great literary masters the fig­
ures of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, or Alice Walker — writers
whose brilliant vernacular ascriptions, writing "degree zero," and carnivalesque
discourse have broken down the time and space of the conventional aesthetic
17
theory of the "white male Brahmins." It is here that the fixity of classical thought
and the exclusionary practices of racist elites impose interpretive shackles on the
literary possibilities of the "other," which include writers who are Black, female,
or belong to minority groups. Addressing the matter of elitism, Freire writes:

16
According to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the canon is profoundly bound by gender, race, and class.
At the same time, she argues that some kind of canon is necessary, if not inevitable, and the present
one need not be completely rewritten. If social transformation is to take place, two things must hap­
pen. First, the established canon must be reinterpreted from the perspectives of history, race, class,
and gender. Second, the canon must be expanded. She writes:
We can, with little difficulty, select texts by standard canonical authors that address issues
of gender, race, and class. We can, in the spirit of contemporary theory, view teaching as
an exercise in hermeneutics: We reread our texts from the perspective of contemporary con­
cerns. In addition, we can transform the entire focus of conventional courses by the themes
we select. . . . Modern criticism reminds us that even a reactionary text may raise contra­
dictions that it imperfectly resolves. (Fox-Genovese, "The Claims of a Common Culture:
Gender, Race, Class and the Canon," Salmagundi, 72 [Fall 1986], 141-142.)
For an excellent critical analysis of some "great books," see Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (New
York: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Eagleton is able to show how the search for identity undertaken by
many of Shakespeare's characters is historically bound up with the exchange economy of commodity
production.
17
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 150-151. Baker's work constitutes a brilliant discussion of
Afro-American culture and literary history, particularly in relation to Afro-American expressive cul­
ture.

226
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

From the authoritarian, elitist, reactionary point of view, the people's incompe­
tence is almost natural. The people need to be defended because they are incapa­
ble of thinking clearly, incapable of abstracting, knowing, and creating; they are
eternally "of lesser value"; and their ideas are permanently labeled exotic. Popular
knowledge does not exist. The authentic manifestations of the culture of the peo­
ple do not exist. The memory of their struggles needs to be forgotten, or those
struggles related in a different way; the "proverbial inculture" of the people does
not permit them to participate actively in the constant reinvention of their society.
(p. 44)

T h e issue here is not necessarily to add oral literatures, minority literatures, and
other noncanonical works to the canon, but to study canonical and noncanonical
works comparatively, with an eye to the historical and ideological reasons why
some works are canonized and others are not and the interests such works promote
within power and knowledge junctures constructed in wider institutional and so­
cial contexts.
T h e disdain of many prescriptivists (especially those influenced by Bloom) for
the prosaic plane of the popular or "vulgar" offers little room for a critical under­
standing of more contemporary cultural formations, such as radio, video, and film
genres, and how they operate in today's world to help construct student subjectivi­
ties. But it is precisely in the understanding of how the everyday and the popular
intersect with the larger social order that the success of critical literacy rests. That
is, for critical literacy to be effective, it must be embedded in the concrete condi­
18
tions of the students themselves. For instance, to ignore or dismiss as barbaric
popular cultural forms such as rock music or music videos is to erroneously deny
the relationships which obtain among popular culture, student experience, and the
construction of ideological codes governing reader reception. Further, it is to will­
fully dismiss as unimportant or insignificant the connection between student alien­
ation from classical texts and new narrative forms currently being constructed in
the domain of the popular. F r o m this vantage point, the idea of a national canon
19
of literary works reeks with intellectual elitism, constitutes an "anti-dialogical"
theory of action, and encourages educators to ignore both popular culture and the

18
To become literate is always to engage the world as a continuous, deep penetration of cultural
and historical experience. Becoming literate can never occur in antiseptic isolation from the world.
Furthermore, criticisms of mainstream literacy programs in schools have been based on the charge
that they have been reduced to a process which encourages students to learn sanitized facts stripped
of ambiguity and contradiction and therefore do not necessarily lead students to be critically minded
or acquire a significant amount of social, political, or intellectual empowerment. As Mikhail Bakhtin
has so presciently shown us, becoming literate is a form of "philosophical anthropology" in which liter­
acy becomes the most empowering precisely when it becomes the most social and contextually inter­
active. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1986).
19
Terry Eagleton reflects the perspective of Freire and Macedo by drawing attention to the ideolog­
ical formations into which works of literature are inserted and valorized. He writes:
Texts are constituted as "literary," in the normative sense, because they are judged to exem­
plify certain peculiar uses of language, to evoke certain significant responses, to communi­
cate certain valued meanings. . . . Literature helps to secure our present social relations,
not in the first place by apologizing for capitalism, but by being Literature. It is already
relevant to class divisions that there exists a privileged body of discourse, sharply demar­
cated from "popular" modes, enshrined and disseminated, as valuable cultural capital, to
future members of the dominant social class. . . . To construct . . . a tradition demands
a practice which will select, reconstitute, process and "correct" certain pieces of writing so
that they compose an imaginary unity, one responsive to the demands of a ruling ideology.
(Eagleton, Critical Quarterly, 20 [1978], 66)

227
Harvard Educational Review

cultural integrity of the student. Simply to attempt to inculcate a set of eternal vir­
tues in students by transmitting a prescribed body of so-called wisdom — as if such
wisdom transcends social contexts and the local ideological agendas to which they
give rise — is virtually to anesthetize consciousness in Freirean terms; it is to adapt
students to become pliable and docile members of the world as it exists rather than
20
as it might become. Rather than encouraging students to become ambassadors
of the status quo, Freire and Macedo invite them to take part in a critically active
transformation of the larger social order. Once the student is able to "depedestal"
the literary tradition of Great Works, he or she can begin to gauge the importance
of popular texts and "local knowledge" in establishing the grounds for a critical lit­
eracy. From a Freirean perspective, Bloom's agenda for educational reform is co­
opted by the very conditions it attempts to analyze because it does not challenge
the premises which structure the logic of its own mode of inquiry.
Freire and Macedo argue against the "banking" form of pedagogy often implied
in prescriptivist models of cultural literacy. T h e authors argue that simply to de­
posit into the memory banks of students tidings from the most esteemed minds of
21
Western culture inhibits the development of a critical consciousness. Freire
makes this position clear in the following remarks:

He who "immobilizes" knowledge and transfers it to students, whether in primary

schools or universities; he who bears only the echo of his own words, in a kind
of oral narcissism; he who believes it insolvent for the working class to recover its
rights; he who thinks the working class is uncultured and incompetent and, thus,
needs to be liberated from top to bottom — this type of educator does not really
have anything to do with freedom or democracy. O n the contrary, he who acts
and thinks this way, consciously or unconsciously, helps to preserve the authori­
tarian structures. (p. 40)

Brushing against the grain of the prescriptivists' quest for a literary canon is
Freire and Macedo's rallying cry to make the content of the curriculum relevant
to the transformation of the sociopolitical reality and life situations of learners.

20
Radical critics of this "value neutral" position pose the question of who decides what text will be
chosen, and which individuals will be selected to engage this privileged text. Hirsch, Bloom, and Ben­
nett fail, in these critics' view, to link the concept of cultural literacy to the empowerment of a lan­
guage of public life, one that resonates with the lived experiences of a heterogeneous population. See
Henry A. Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age (Minneap­
olis: University of Minnesota Press, in press). See also Peter McLaren, "Foreword: Critical Theory
and the Meaning of Hope," in Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Pedagogy of Practical Learning by Henry
A. Giroux (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, in press); Peter McLaren, "Postmodernism and
the Death of Politics: A Brazilian Reprieve," Educational Theory, 36 (1986), 389-401; Peter McLaren,
Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Social Foundations of Education (New York: Long­
man, in press); and Laurie McDade, "The Deficit-Difference Debate: Theoretical Smokescreen for
a Conservative Ambush," paper presented at the meeting of the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education
Society, Lexington, Kentucky, October 16, 1987.
21
Critics of this view of cultural transmission argue against the position that the meanings of great
works are forever fixed, and assert instead that the very act of reading a text subjects the reader to
the textual strategies of the writing in question and its attempt to position readers as subjects and to
extend to them its values and view of the world. Feminist critics of this version of cultural literacy
argue that it is possible to trace the formative power of patriarchal, class, and racial interests not just
in modes of reading and the constitution of the canon, but in what is available to be read at all. See
Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 169-
170. We gain a key insight into Hirsch's epistemology and pedagogy from his early work, Validity
in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), which is concerned with how meaning is

228
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

T h e y assert that students become active, knowing subjects not by being fed cul­
tural information but through the process of conscientization, that is, through learn­
ing to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions in the social world
in order to transform one's lived social relations and the larger, macrosocial
22
order. Freire and Macedo know that their primary matrix as educators is co­
extensive not with the logic of capitalism but with the suffering of the oppressed.
A critical literacy situates itself in the intersection of language, culture, power, and
history — the nexus in which the subjectivities of students are formed through in­
corporation, accommodation, and contestation. T h e struggle is one that involves
their history, their language, and their culture, and the pedagogical implications are
such that students are given access to a critical discourse or are conditioned to ac­
cept the familiar and self-evident as the inevitable. Worse still, they are denied a

communicated. According to Hirsch, meanings can be shared and truth thus preserved because the
objects of understanding have a unitary, fixed, or ideal essence. Meanings are determinate, possess
boundaries and self-identity, and can be directly transferred from the consciousness of one person to
that of another. This makes it possible for a number of persons to hold the same meaning or to share
similar interpretations of events. In Hirsch's view, individuals are the authors of their own meanings:
they claim actual ownership over their meanings. Thus, people can share in other people's meanings
quite readily. Meanings are stable and determinant and escape the contingency and indeterminacy
of individual consciousness. In this account, Hirsch's epistemology is very traditional and stands in
direct opposition to more recent influences within the domain of critical pedagogy made by decon­
struction and postmodern social theory. For Hirsch, meanings can be willed by individuals who fix
the contexts of their messages. To share somebody's meaning, we must become subservient to the
will or unified with the intentionality of the author of that meaning. In contrast, deconstruction at­
tacks the concept of rational volition and the law of identity, as do recent manifestations of poststruc­
turalism, continental philosophy, and postfeminism. The concepts of the "decentered subject" and the
radical discontinuity and fragmentation of the ideal object — which are taken seriously in these recent
theories of discourse — have important implications for developing a pedagogy of literacy. By purging
concepts of their unequivocal metaphysical foundations (foundations which Hirsch seeks to preserve
at all costs), the concepts of truth and meaning become, in the poststructuralist view, contingent on
the contexts of culture, language, history, and the material forces of production. This formulation
of meaning shatters the concept of the ideal wholeness of meaning which undergirds the epistemology of
Hirsch. Freire and Macedo, in contrast to Hirsch, are in partial sympathy with the poststructuralist
position on meaning in that they recognize its contingency and ideological dimensions, which they
argue must be probed by a radical doubt. Freire and Macedo are not denying that meanings may
be intended and communicated by an author; rather, they suggest that meanings cannot be essential­
ized outside of the experiences readers bring to those meanings, the cultural contexts in which those
meanings are generated, and the historical juncture in which text and reader meet. Language, in this
view, is structurally open and may be detached from the intention of its user. That is, there always
exists the possibility that language may position both author and reader ideologically within relations
of power according to the contextual specificities of race, class, and gender. These contexts must be
understood and addressed if we are to become critically literate. Hirsch, however, assumes that mean­
ings, as fixed and shareable, may be transferred from text to reader independent of the messy web
of ideological ingredients that might throw doubt on or alter the substance of what the author of the
text intended. Freire and Macedo do not assume that meanings can be deposited in readers' minds
as fixed essences, for in their view, meanings inscribed by language are always subject to the contex­
tual specificity of their generation and reception. Meanings, in other words, are always dependent
upon who interprets them and the experiences brought to the act of interpretation. For instance,
neither women's nor men's experiences as readers are homogeneous. The same is true for White
women and Black women, White men and Black men, middle-class students and economically disen­
franchised students. For a discussion of Hirsch's epistemology in relation to the theories of Wittgen­
stein and Derrida, see Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1984), pp. 139-145.
22
Adrian Bennett has enlarged our understanding of the politics of literacy by recognizing that stu­
dents do not simply communicate sociolinguistically through various "participant structures" (that is,
restricted or elaborate codes, oral or literate modes, literary practices), but also engage in what he

229
Harvard Educational Review

voice with which to be present in the world; they are made invisible to history and
rendered powerless to shape it. Critical literacy in Freire's terms is a transgressive
act of reading the word and the world that embodies an attack on dominant signi­
fying practices and calls into question the moribund scruples of the bourgeois
humanist text, placing them in a wider social and temporal context. A n y Freirean
approach to the canon must therefore make clear the fact that texts are products
of the interests that inform dominant social and cultural groups, and that educa­
tors must assuredly probe the canon for what it does not say — for its "structured
silences," its "present absences," its exclusionary politics — as well as for what it ac­
tually does say. Freire and Macedo deny a privileged status to claims that knowl­
edge finds its quintessential expression in classical discourse. Rather than arguing
for a cultural canon of inherited texts, Freire advocates the creation of what he
calls the "popular library." A popular library would serve as a cultural aid and
learning center "and not just a silent depository of books" (p. 45). T h e purpose of
constructing a network of popular libraries would be to "stimulate educational or
popular culture programs (in the fields of adult literacy, health education, re­
search, theatre, technical training, and religion), programs that respond to the
popular demands provoked by an effort of the popular culture" (p. 46). Freire and
Macedo situate learning in the terrain of the popular, wherein it becomes an active
process of dialogical engagement between teachers and students. What emerges
from a collaborative pedagogy between teachers and students is a knowledge that
is generated dialectically from cultural ingredients that could be — and often are —
both canonical and non-canonical. T h e idea of the popular library as set forth by
Freire differs from the common cultural index advocated by Hirsch, in that Hirsch
pays little attention to the sociopolitical context which frames the act of knowing.
Also lacking in Hirsch's work is an understanding of the power/knowledge junc­
tures in which pedagogy is practiced and learning takes place. If, on the other
hand, we are to make a clear distinction between cultural literacy as set forth by
prescriptivists influenced by Bloom, and critical literacy as advocated by Freire
and Macedo, we would have to say that the former position transforms high cul­
ture into a form of currency made up of essentially inert ideas culled from the se­
lective tradition of classic literature, which are to be deposited among the uncul­
tured as timeless truths. T h e Freirean position, on the other hand, invites an un­
derstanding of culture as the lived relation of individuals to historical conditions
and material circumstances. Literacy is something that grows out of these lived
relations as part of the dynamics of everyday life.

calls "participant struggles." Bennett uses this term to underscore his observation that students fre­
quently question the contradictions inherent in the ideologies voiced by the teacher, very often with­
out recognizing it. Bennett formulates illiteracy as an act of refusal, one in which students engage
in a struggle over the ways in which conflicting interpretations of the social world are considered valid
by both students and teachers alike. In this view, becoming literate, or refusing to be literate, involves
a sociopolitical struggle over whether the teacher's interpretation of the world is to prevail and over
how much serious accord will be given the voices of the students. Acquiring literacy is thus fundamen­
tally linked to the model of social life students and teachers use to articulate their ideas in their inter­
action with each other, and to what degree these models are tied to specific social, political, and eco­
nomic interests. The crucial question that is immediately raised by this insight is: What are the social
conditions that construct the framework out of which students and teachers "read" particular forms
of knowledge? See Adrian T. Bennett, The Struggle for Voice: Literacy and Consciousness in an East Harlem
School (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, in press). See also Peter McLaren, Schooling as a Ritual
Performance (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

230
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

W e could thus say that literacy in Freire and Macedo's view is language that
is enfleshed; that is, language consisting of many tissues of meaning which have
been constructed not only through a rational engagement with the cultural world
but through an engagement in this world by the learner's own body. A l l discourse,
spoken or written, is caught in the net of the body. Literacy, therefore, is an act
of the body. Language not only organizes and legitimates our world on a rational
basis but resonates with and constructs our "felt" needs, desires, and values. Liter­
acy divorced from the lived situations of the learner is a form of disembodied
knowledge, severed from the interests, values, and concerns of the learner. What
makes literacy "critical," in Freire and Macedo's view, is its ability to make the
learner aware of how relations of power, institutional structures, and models of
representation work on and through the learner's mind and body to keep him or
her powerless, imprisoned in a culture of silence.
In fact, a critical perspective demands that the very ideological process of lan­
guage construction itself be interrogated. Individually and collectively we produce
language, yet the social reality which language constructs, conveys, and objectifies
also produces us, its users, by providing us with subject positions from which to
speak and consequently from which to be spoken to. A s a social practice, language
is constituted by material and social reality which informs both its codes and the
subjectivities of its users. Language provides us with tools with which to shape
meaning from a universe of indeterminate signs; yet the very tools we use to cob­
ble meaning have been fired in the same crucible of historical and discursive strug­
gle from which we have forged the linguistic weapons for our crusades of cultural
domination.

Conclusion
Freire and Macedo argue that the fundamental structural principle of a pedagogy
of critical literacy is the need for pedagogical practices that will provide students
with the opportunity to use their own reality, including the language these stu­
dents bring into the classroom, as the basis of literacy. However, Freire and M a ­
cedo also make clear that while educators "should never allow the students' voice
to be silenced by a distorted legitimation of the standard language" (p. 152), they
should, nonetheless, "understand the value of mastering the standard dominant
language of the wider society" (p. 152). This perspective goes directly against the
claim made by William Bennett that only English "will ensure that local schools will
succeed in teaching non-English-speaking students English so that they will [en­
joy] access to the opportunities of the American society" (p. 155). Bennett's claim
also contradicts the theoretical and research literature which argues that literacy
skills acquired through linguistic interaction in one language (such as Spanish)
play a major role in making input in another language (such as English) compre­
23
hensible.
Mainstream approaches to pedagogy, as advocated by Bennett and others, are
unable to develop a critical literacy because, in Freire's view, they violate the basic

23
See S. Krashen and D. Biber, Bilingual Education in California, report prepared for the California
Association for Bilingual Education, 1987. See also Jim Cummins, Bilingualism and Special Education:
Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy (Clevedon, Eng.: Multilingual Matters, 1984, copublished in the
United States by College-Hill Press, San Diego); Jim Cummins, "Empowering Minority Students:
A Framework for Intervention," Harvard Educational Review, 56 (1986), 18-36; and Jim Cummins,
Empowering Minority Students (Albany: State University of New York Press, in press).

231
Harvard Educational Review

structuring principle of emancipatory pedagogy, which focuses on empowerment.

Empowerment in this instance refers to the process of helping students acquire
modes of critical analysis which will provide them with both the theoretical ability
and moral incentive to transform, rather than merely serve, the dominant social
order. In any pedagogy of critical literacy, certain values must be made concrete.
These include the values of "solidarity, social responsibility, creative discipline in
the service of the common good, vigilance, and critical spirit" (p. 156), all of which
are to be linked pedagogically to the overall goal of "national reconstruction."
Freire and Macedo understand that, as a form of political empowerment, critical
24
literacy represents both a theory of pedagogy and a pedagogy of theory. It consti­
tutes a theory of pedagogy in that students are taught to analyze critically how cul­
ture functions within asymmetrical relations of power to give certain groups an
advantage over others on the basis of race, class, and gender. It serves as a peda­
gogy of theory because it recognizes that only when theory transforms itself into
praxis and engages in a project of possibility does it truly enter the world of eman­
cipatory teaching. That is, only when theory becomes transformed into a political
act can it realize its socially transformative potential.
Freire and Macedo read the problem of illiteracy in American education pri­
marily as one of resistance to a dehumanizing and alienating culture of silence,
as well as an act of self-affirmation. Ironically, this perspective turns the act of re­
sistance into an exercise of critical literacy:

The many people who pass through school and come out illiterate because they
resisted and refused to read the dominant word are representative of self-affirma­
tion. This self-affirmation is, from another point of view, a process of literacy in
the normal, global sense of the term. That is, the refusal to read the word chosen
by the teacher is the realization on the part of the student that he or she is making
a decision not to accept what is perceived as violating his or her world. (p. 123)

For Americans besieged by the relentless logic of consumerism and privatiza­

tion, it is no wonder that illiteracy thrives as a means of resistance — of refusing
to be part of the cultural nightmare. What is needed to meet the crisis of literacy
is a critical theory that frames reading, writing, and the performance of public dis­
course in terms of moral and political decisionmaking. Literacy in this view is not
linked to learning to read advertisements in order to become a better consumer,
to escaping into the pages of a romance novel or spy thriller, or to engaging a clas­
sical work of literature in order to learn the meaning of "the good" or "the true"
so that one can live "the virtuous life." Rather, a critical literacy links language
competency to the acquisition of a public discourse in which empowered individu­
als are capable of critically engaging the social, political, and ethical dimensions
of everyday life. T o be literate in this instance means not only being able to
understand and engage the world but also to be able to exercise the kind of moral
courage needed to change the social order when necessary. Such a perspective of
literacy astutely recognizes that language is that sociolinguistic territory in which
history both rehearses its nightmares and dreams its liberating possibilities. L a n ­
guage may be used to affirm the voices of the marginalized and disaffected or to
silence them. Critical literacy acknowledges the importance of constructing "dan­
gerous memories" — depictions of events of human suffering and courage —

24
See David Lusted, "Why Pedagogy?" Screen, 27 (1986), 4-5.

232
 Essay Reviews
PETER L. MCLAREN

through excavating, rescuing, and affirming the voices of those who have been si­
lenced and marginalized by the dominant culture. In this regard, critical literacy
becomes an expression of both protest and hope that leads to political action.
T h e solution to achieving critical literacy in the classroom rests, according to
Freire, "in a full understanding of the ideological elements that generate and sus­
tain linguistic, racial, and sex discrimination" (p. 155). O n l y by approaching liter­
acy as a form of ideological critique can knowledge be made critically relevant to
students and eventually lead to a reinvention of society through a transformation
of the oppressive power relations which structure society. It is precisely in this em­
phasis on an ideological unveiling of the oppressive features of social reality that
Freire and Macedo tend to repeat themselves, thereby limiting possibilities for fur­
ther theoretical advancement. T o o often they refrain from being explicit about the
connections between critical literacy and critical pedagogy, although this link is
discussed thoroughly in Giroux's preface. While the authors have argued for the
importance of student experience in developing a critical pedagogy, they some­
times fail to articulate how popular culture — especially in the context of the United
States — enables as well as constrains the development of student subjectivity.
Consequently, the authors have neglected to build into their critical pedagogy
those life-affirming dimensions of popular culture which could point to potentially
liberating forms of social relations, of ways to create meaning, and of ways of rep­
resenting ourselves, our relations to others, and our relation to the environment —
in short, possibilities not yet realized. This criticism should not, however, detract
from the overwhelming strength and brilliance of this book.
Some readers of Literacy: Reading the Word and the World may be disappointed by
its lack of a technically articulated model of educational change. T h i s criticism has
been anticipated and rejected outright by Freire and Macedo in one of their dia­
logues. M a k i n g very clear that he disdains "texts that primarily give recipes,"
Freire announces his "[refusal] to write such texts, because [his] political convic­
tions are opposed to the ideology that feeds such domestication of the mind" (p.
134). While some readers may view this as a deliberate attempt to avoid being
pinned down theoretically or perhaps even pedagogically, Freire would consider
such criticism to be consistent with that aspect of North American ideology which
reveres the logic of quick fixes. This is the same logic that, when embodied by edu­
cators, shrinks their capacity to comprehend critically the contextual conditions of
Freire's own work and to investigate these conditions in their own classrooms. T h e
tacit injunction, "don't criticize something unless you have a blueprint of the solu­
tion," seeks to freeze knowledge in its instrumental moment, refuses to address the
dialectical tension between theory and practice, and refrains from acknowledging
the provisional nature of truth itself. Those more familiar with or sympathetic to­
wards Freire's work will clearly see the redemptive logic in Freire's idea that educa­
tion is primarily about problem-posing rather than answer-giving. Once old prob­
lems have been resolved, new problems must be formulated. Freire and Macedo
implicitly recognize that the struggle over knowledge is one that can never be won,
25
or pedagogy stops.
One of the great strengths of Literacy: Reading the Word and the World is that it
refuses to reduce critical educational theory to a blueprint for educational transfor-

25
See Magda Lewis and Roger I. Simon, "A Discourse Not Intended for Her: Learning and
Teaching within Patriarchy," Harvard Educational Review, 56 (1986), 457-472. See also Henry A. Gi­
roux and Roger Simon, "Ideology, Popular Culture and Pedagogy," Curriculum and Teaching (in press).

233
Harvard Educational Review

mation, while at the same time challenging readers with a wide array of sensitizing
constructs, critically articulated and passionately advocated, with which to rethink
their educational priorities. Such an accomplishment cannot be overlooked, espe­
cially during an era in which the nature of critical knowledge is increasingly being
redefined, codified for mass consumption, and imposed on teachers in a top-down
fashion, irrespective of the class, gender, and racial characteristics of the vast
numbers of students whom such knowledge is intended to serve. In the final in­
stance, Freire and Macedo are able to illustrate what could be called radical hope.
Radical hope is always multivocal, and carries with it a surplus of meaning. Like
language, radical hope signifies beyond its own significance. Moreover, it resists
the fixity of interpretation that could turn it into despair, and refuses to abandon
the moral principles which generate it, thus preventing it from becoming merely
"wishful thinking."
Literacy: Reading the Word and the World provides an articulate and courageous re­
sponse to current questions arising from the literacy debate. It extends beyond the
question of how language functions to the critical issue of how it should function.
Freire and Macedo offer readers an ethical imperative designed to assist them in
taking responsibility for their linguistic practices. In the final instance, Literacy:
Reading the Word and the World establishes a framework for literacy which succeeds
in insuring the diversity of culture and providing for the transformation of oppres­
sive social practices. Like Bakhtin, Freire and Macedo remind us that we are all
always authors, every time we speak or listen, read or write, and that ultimately
26
we must assume the moral obligation for our dialogue with the world.

26
Gary Saul Morson, "Preface: Perhaps Bakhtin," in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed.
Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. x.

234
This material has been reprinted with permission of the Harvard Educational
Review for personal use only. Any other use, print or electronic, will require written
permission from the Review. For more information, please visit
www.harvardeducationalreview.org or call 1-617-495-3432.

Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

The Harvard Educational Review is an imprint of the Harvard Education Publishing

Group, publishers of the Harvard Education Letter and books under the imprint
Harvard Education Press. HEPG’s editorial offices are located at 8 Story Street,
First Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138, tel. 617-495-3432, or email to
[email protected].