September 24, 2007

Critical Literacy and Resurrection

Posted by kameelah rasheed at 12:06PM

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In Animal Farm by George Orwell, Squealer, a clever demagogue and propagandizing pig says to the other animals, "I could show you the secret documents, if you were able to read." He was referring to the speculative (and non-existent) secret document that blamed Snowball, another leading pig exiled from the farm, for all of the bad things that that were happening. Squealer mocks the other animals because he knows his ability to read and write will give him an advantage over the other animals who are still struggling to make out the first four letters of the alphabet. The animals can't read because no sustainable efforts were taken to teach them, which reveals the farm and our world's "economy of illiteracy."

A cautionary tale about dystopia, Animal Farm is also a cautionary tale about the ways illiteracy and unquestioned reliance on the good intentions of our leaders can lead us astray. When critical literacy -- the ability and processes of not only reading the text, but the intentions, implications and contexts of the text -- are so important, why are typical educational benchmarks solely consumed with basic literacy and phonics? If we're aiming towards creating educational democracy, and a truly educated populace, shouldn't our goal be to arm young people with the skills and experience to make deep analytic decisions as well as connections? Shouldn't we give our youth the tools to know when they are being deceived and to know that what is written is not always reflective of reality, but more reflective of desires and historical context?

I am not even going to lie; I have been illiterate most of my life, and probably still am in many ways. I was always at the top of my class, skipped a grade, and recognized for academic achievement, but the one skill that I lacked was the ability to read beyond the written word and decipher the world the writer desired to create. I was the smartest kid and the dumbest kid all at once.

It wasn't until I was 12 years old when my family was kicked out of our home in East Palo Alto and turned to homeless shelters before finally moving into the two small back rooms of my grandmother's home where we still live that I finally "got it." I learned from a young age that while material wealth was inaccessible, literacy wealth allowed me to critically read the world in such a way that guided my political actions. I followed the textual footprints of those like Cheryl Wright who declare, "I like fighting with my words. My words whoop people's asses many a day before I have to use my fists."

I read as much as I could, dived into news shows, texts, and classroom discussions with an almost hostile cynicism and deployed sometimes lyrical diatribes all because I knew my life literally depended on deciphering those moments where I was "game," and excavating the discursive and material technologies that assisted our government in normalizing poverty, homelessness and abuse. I read and wrote to feel alive when I felt like my life was haunted by the looming presence of death. Critical literacy became my resurrection from a metaphorical death and the reawakening from a comatose state induced by a schooling project and a larger social engineering project that seeks render us all capable readers, but not capable thinkers.

In Paulo Freire's "Banking System of Education" he speaks to the politics of necrophilia in schooling and how critical thinkers become an outlaw culture in schools that seek to own, collect and render students as embalmed fixtures on the stage of oppressive classroom monologues and technologies. Freire wrote:

Oppression-overwhelming control-is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic.

In this power dynamic, schools engage in ritualistic killing of student's spirit and thinking. Through the domestication and control that flow from classrooms, to public space control, to prison politics, to the commodification of non-conformity, students are "killed" and frozen in anachronistic spaces. For those students who spirits' are not completely extinguished, they become muffled and suffocated.

Literacy is a life long process to bring yourself back to life -- to be reborn or baptized into a radical way of reading, writing, seeing, speaking. Critical literacy is both a spiritual as well as political engagement that begs us to not only clean our mind of built up debris, but clean our soul as well. It reminds us of the ways our minds and souls have been used against us, and how we need to reclaim them for our own use.