Brandt, Deborah. "Chapter 3: Accumulating Literacy: How Four Generations of One American Family Learned to Write." Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 73-105. Print.
Brandt begins this chapter by showing a dichotomy in education within one family. Genna May, who was born in 1898 on a farm in Wisconsin, learned to write in a one-room school house at the age of seven while her great-grandson Michael, who was born in 1981 in a suburb, learned to write before kindergarten. Genna May practiced her writing sporadically on slate with chalk while Michael practiced his writing everyday on computers. “These accounts by two members of the same family capture many of the economic and social transformations of twentieth-century America: population movements from farms to urban centers to suburbs; shifts in the economic base from agriculture to manufacturing to information processing; the rise of big business; a rapid escalation in educational expectations; revolutions in communication technology; and the growth of a print culture so saturating that it has become a principal means by which some children learn to talk” (Brandt, 74). We are then introduced to Sam May, Genna’s son who was born in 1925. Sam remembers learning to write using “Palmer method handbooks” (82) of which his aunt “kept in a locked case” (82). After Sam, the reader is introduced to Jack May, Sam’s son, who was born in 1958. Jack remembers “’lots’ of books in a room of the house called ‘the library’” (92) and he remembers writing essays at the beginning of each school year about what he had done on his summer vacation. Brandt writes, “Each of the Mays developed literacy within key moments of economic transition in their reigion. These transitions routed opportunities for reading and writing, defined the shifting value of their skills, and in turn affected the way they practiced and passed on literacy to the next generation” (101).
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