Week 5: Reading Responses

·         Brandt’s Chapter 1: Literacy Opportunity, and Economic Change

o   Brandt writes, “Regional histories also illuminate the value of literacy as a resource.  In the early days of mass literacy, the worth of individual literacy would rise with the rates of literacy in a region.  The greater number of people who would read or write, the more those skills could be traded on to conduct social and economic relations and the more likely that reading and writing skills learned in youth would not be lost” (29).

§  I suppose I take my literacy for granted.  In “my world”, reading and writing is learned very early and by everyone.  Because of literacy being acquired early and by everyone in “my world”, I never really thought about literacy being lost.  Sure penmanship and vocabulary may eventually fail me one day (not that either were amazing to begin with), but to complete lose my abilities to read and write for shear lack of trying? Will there ever be a day I don’t read and write? Does texting count? (joke)

·         Brandt’s Chapter 2: Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary America

o   Brandt writes, “In the 1960s and 1970s with a focus on the on the prisoner’s right to read, there was a growing call for decoupling libraries from prison objectives and adopting the all-purpose service models of regular public libraries.  Throughout this period, however, most libraries remained under control of correctional authorities and functioned primarily as adjuncts to educational programs” (67).

§  Even in the prison system, literacy is not something that is common or a right for all.  Once again, this plays into the power-struggle of who can and cannot read and write and who controls the authority to say so.  As free men and women, the prisoners could expand on and practice their literacy, but while incarcerated, that freedom of literacy is taken from them.  Literacy is a very powerful thing and I can see how prisons, though I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with their system, would want to restrict or completely do away with the prisoners’ access to it.

·         Brandt’s Chapter 4: “The Power of It”: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives

o   Brandt writes, “The holistic sensibilities of the African American church helped to hold intact a powerful, multiply performing sponsor that promoted integration over fragmentation, persistence over change, remembering over forgetting.  As a by-product of helping members to keep body and soul together (often against the harshest conditions), the church also held together unique and enduring orientations to the written word that partook of this tradition” (112).

§  I think I often times forget that literacy can be fostered and developed outside of the traditional classroom.  I know that I can remember reading and writing Bible verses in Sunday School before kindergarten. When people come together and there is a need for literacy, literacy will be encouraged, whether it is in a classroom or not.  Moreover, in the case of a church, a specific or unique type of literacy is occurring that otherwise couldn’t be expressed in most schools and would otherwise be forgotten.

·         Brandt’s Chapter 5: The Scared and Profane: Reading versus Writing in Popular Memory

o   Brandt writes, “A closer look at the functions of writing and reading in households revealed how much more stratified writing was than reading, by which I mean there seemed to be more natural opportunities to share reading and knowledge about reading across generations than is the case for writing” (160).

§  While it took me a minute to figure out what I think Brandt is trying to say, once I digested it, it makes complete sense.  Growing up, my parents and grandparents read to me; they didn’t share person essays with me.  My parents and grandparents took me to libraries and book stores; they didn’t take me to writing seminars.  Reading just lends itself more easily to sharing.

·         Brandt’s Chapter 6: The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification at the Twenty-First Century

o   Brandt writes, “Literacy became a key resource, a raw material, for the American economy of the twentieth century, and that in turn has had untold impact on the ways that literacy is accessed, learned, and rewarded—it affects the materials we use for literacy, the routes we have or don’t have to learning it, the public meaning that are ascribed to it, the social inequities that cling to it” (188).

§  I guess I’ve never really taken to the time to look back on how literacy came about and how my literacy happened until this class.  Literacy isn’t something that just happens, books aren’t just printed and read, and papers just don’t write themselves.  No, literacy is an active process that is constantly developing and changing with the world around it. Because of that fact, those without literacy are in world that simply doesn’t work for them.  A world where reading and writing are expected and praised and those without are left out.