Customer Reviews

Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In his polemical book Literacy with an Attitude, Patrick J. Finn is extremely critical of social change through accommodation. Accommodation is ineffective because it delays, and sometimes prevents, the social reforms that people need and deserve, he argues. The educational system is full of well-intentioned people who support the status quo, preventing needed reforms, because they do not engage in political acts that would be seen as controversial.

Finn is critical of trying to change society by simply changing the hearts and minds of those who control the power and the money. Finn goes further and stresses that those who are affected by injustice must be empowered. This empowerment is not merely a transfer of power, but is the creation and acquisition of power by the powerless.

Finn draws on the research and work of many progressive educators and activists. Several of the people who I found particularly impressive are:

* John Ogbu, a Nigerian-American anthropologist and professor who distinguished between immigrant minorities and involuntary minorities. Involuntary minorities develop "oppositional identities" that prevent them from adopting behaviors they associate with the dominant culture that discriminates against them.

* Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who developed effective strategies for teaching literacy to poor adults. He used "culture circles" to create supportive networks that encouraged the students to build on what they already knew and to think critically. Freire's use of dialogue in teaching was both respectful and empowering.

* Robert Peterson, a "social justice educator and disciple of Freire." Teachers who want to teach working class students in anything but an authoritarian way must "be prepared for an enormous struggle," he says.

* William Bigelow and Linda Christensen, high school teachers in Oregon, who say that "dialogue is something other than conversation in the classroom." They teach that a deeper version of history requires students to think about the issues underlying many familiar stories.

For example, the story of Rosa Parks is different and more powerful when we know that "she had been ejected from buses before for refusing to give up her seat, but never before arrested." She was not a passive actor who Fate selected. She was the secretary of the local NAACP. She was part of a group that had been discussing how to fight discrimination for some time, which group was ready to organize meetings and boycotts when Parks was arrested. I was not taught these details as a student. As Finn and many of the other writers he quotes point out: when we know the real histories of how social reforms have been brought about in the past, we infer that future reforms will also require disruption of the status quo.

I don't like a lot of what Finn says in LWAT. It makes me uncomfortable. However, I find many of his arguments persuasive, even though they make me uncomfortable. There's a part of me that wishes meritocracy really worked. However, based on my own experiences, and supported by Finn and the research in his book, I am persuaded that as a high school teacher of working class students, I will need to develop additional skills and viewpoints in order to help many of the students not only to become literate but also to create knowledge, to "create products and art," and to acquire power-not through the benevolence, generosity, or condescension of those who already have it, but through negotiation and agitation, through civil and social reforms brought about by the activism of students, families, teachers, and communities.

Merlin Mann wrote that the advice we want isn't always the advice we need. "The best advice you'll get in life hurts like hell at the time. Because it has to." Reassuring ourselves with comfortable advice that doesn't challenge our own status quo "will actively get in the way of fundamental improvement by obscuring the advice we need with the advice that we enjoy. And, the advice that's easy to take is so rarely the advice that could really make a difference."

I am also reminded of what Franz Kafka wrote about books that make us uncomfortable:

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist
hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it
shall make us happy? Good God, we would also be happy if we
had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if
need be, write ourselves.... But what we must have are those
books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us
deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves,
like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea
frozen inside us.

I have come away from Literacy with an Attitude feeling both challenged and criticized. It is a powerful book. It is also an annoying book, an exciting book, and a tiring book. Finn effectively portrays the ineffective ways that working class students are taught in make-believe schools, performing mechanical academic work that prepares them for mechanical work later.

The most important of my responses to LWAT, however, is the excitement I feel in confronting fresh ideas about how to be a successful high school teacher. I look forward to incorporating the ideas and approaches to lesson development of Finn and the other teachers he writes about.

the book was in the condition described. it came on time but took the maximum 11 days it said to ship. good work. keep it up. would buy again

This is pure and unadulterated crap. The author's premise that we must educate poor and working class children in their own self interest is pure communist dogma. A free and public education should not include idea and concepts counter to the the democratic ideals of personal liberty and responsibility. If you are looking for a book that support your preexisting socialist philosophy, then this book is for you. If you are actually interested teaching children to read, write and think critically as they become full participants in our democracy, then I would recommend a book on research validated instructional practices. If I could give this less than one star, I would do so.
Misha