Literacy in American Lives

272 Pages·2001·0.94 MB·English

by  Deborah Brandt

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LITERACY IN
AMERICAN LIVES
Literacy in American Lives traces the changing conditions of literacy learning as
they were felt in the lives of ordinary Americans born between 1895 and 1985.
The book demonstrates what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to
successive generations of Americans and how – as students,workers,parents,and
citizens – they have responded to rapid changes in the meaning and methods of
literacy learning in their society. Drawing on more than 80 life histories of
Americans from all walks of life,the book addresses critical questions facing pub-
lic education at the twenty-first century: How does rapid economic restructuring
affect the ways that individuals acquire reading and writing? How do families pass
the skills of reading and writing on to children under conditions of relentless social
and technological change? What is the role of economic change in maintaining
inequality in access and reward for literacy? What is the human impact of the
nation’s growing reliance on the literacy skills of workers? Using extended case
studies,this book gets beyond the usual laments about the crisis in literacy to offer
an often surprising look into the ways that literacy is lived in America.
Deborah Brandt is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
She is author of Literacy as Involvement, which won the 1993 David H. Russell
Award for Distinguished Research from the National Council of Teachers of
English. In 1998–1999,she was a Visiting Fellow at the U.S. Department of
Education in Washington,D.C.
LITERACY IN
AMERICAN LIVES
Deborah Brandt
University of Wisconsin–Madison
         
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
  
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
© Deborah Brandt 2004
First published in printed format 2001
ISBN 0-511-03113-0 eBook (Adobe Reader)
ISBN 0-521-78315-1 hardback
ISBN 0-521-00306-7 paperback
For Hannah Brandt,
who showed me how to write.
And Del Brandt,
who showed me why to write.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS page ix
Introduction:The Pursuit of Literacy 1
1 Literacy, Opportunity, and Economic Change 25
2 Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary America 47
3 Accumulating Literacy: How Four Generations
of One American Family Learned to Write 73
4 “The Power of It”: Sponsors of Literacy in African
American Lives 105
5 The Sacred and the Profane: Reading versus Writing
in Popular Memory 146
6 The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification
at the Twenty-First Century 169
Conclusion: Literacy in American Lives 187
APPENDIX: INTERVIEW SCRIPT 208
NOTES 211
BIBLIOGRAPHY 235
INDEX 249
vii