Lit In America Part One
So: literacy is the key in fighting the power; or the key to oppressing the insufficiently literate. It’s funny how power flows along two paths, maybe more. This does explain the obsessive focus of the current regime on standardized testing. While sounding as if they want “no child left behind,“ I think it is more an attempt to destroy the public education system, because it is easier to control the ignorant. “Although in principle literacy is a foundation of American democracy it is in practice a troublesome source of inequity and disequilibrium in the administration of justice. Knowing how to read enhances political and economic rights, whereas not knowing how to read diminishes them.” (Brandt 2001, p. 47) Several years ago when this idea of the destruction of the public education system first popped into my waking life, I dismissed it as dangerously conspiratorial; and since I have had a couple of long friendships implode due to their being consumed pod-people-like by conspiracy theories, I am extremely leery when my own thinking drifts in that direction. Yet I see it stated fairly explicitly in much of the reading I have been doing in the last six months, “The knowledge that the elite’s control may be their strength but it also constitutes their vulnerability. Saul says of the elite’s that the ‘possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme-the theme song of their expertise.’ He(Saul) believes that ‘their power depends not on the effect with which they use that knowledge but on the effectiveness with which they control its use.” (Saul 1992, p. 8 as cited in Crotty, 2003 p.113) This would also explain the turn in what constitutes “knowledge,” especially in education, where only replicable positivist research is now being funded by the federal government. Science, which is not as exact as the myth perpetuates, can make us all into fact filled automatons which are easier to control because we are not taught to think on our own or accept our own authority as equal to the credentialized monolith. An ironic statement as I make an attempt to become a part of the credentialized monolith with this doctoral program.
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