Blog Response #6: I Read! I'm GOOD!

More than any article we have read thus far, I think that our sixth foray into the world of pedagogical/composition theory this semester addresses the connection between literacy and perceived morality. It’s an interesting idea, to be sure, one that I’d like to explore further.

So I will.

Growing up in Southern California (and, yes, I do capitalize “Southern,” as it is another country—nay, world—altogether), I was thrust into a unique situation upon entering my primary education at Esplanade Elementary School. It was my first and, in many ways, my favorite elementary school. (Later I was sent to a so-called “magnet” school, La Veta Elementary School, which was pretty good, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for good ol’ Esplanade.) Esplanade was unique for its demographic—its school boundaries encompassed neighborhoods both wealthy and modest. In Orange County, modest often means Latino.

I had no problem with it. Really, I thought it was great, the way we celebrated Latino—particularly Mexican—culture in school. However, it gives me shame to think that, at the same time that I was celebrating Latino culture in school, I shared many of the prejudices common to Southern California. For example, as my mother would drive me to Esplanade, we would pass a street corner where many Latino immigrants stood around, waiting to work as day-laborers. I remember it offending me; I would comment on it later, to friends.

Again, I remember this with shame. Now, the years having gone by and my experience broadened, I feel bad for those day-laborers—it’s a tough road to walk, indeed. I remember when, living in Costa Rica, I saw day-laborers from Nicaragua driven around by the dozen in the beds of open-back trucks; their work was long, sweaty, dangerous. I imagine that, in California, the situation couldn’t have been much better. I remember once that an acquaintance of mine laughingly recalled a prank he pulled on a friend; he had hired a day-laborer to dig a hole in the lawn of his friend. When the friend arrived home to find his lawn replaced by a giant hole, the day-laborer was told—in no uncertain words, I’m sure—to get lost. It was, for that poor man, a day lost.

Why all this hostility toward the day-laborers, many of whom worked harder than the people in the cars who passed them? There was, I believe, a perception that they lacked morality due to their lack of education, of literacy: they didn’t speak English, first of all, and they were poor, which was something of a transgression in Southern California.

In other words, since my youth, I have been aware of the connection between education and perceived morality, and I appreciate that this article explores reasons why that connection exists. One passage particularly caught my eye; describing the connecting between morality and education, the author says:

In The Literacy Myth, Harvey Graff, for instance, exposes a subtle transformation in the ideological basis of nineteenth-century literacy in Canada. In a church-dominated society, reading was used as a medium for moral training; one read in order to learn right behavior. Eventually economic and state interests eclipsed religious ones, yet moral connotations continued to cling to literacy. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ability to read was no longer regarded as an avenue to morality but rather as an indication of moral behavior itself (just as illiteracy became-in and of itself an indication of antisocial or immoral behavior). (654)

While I can see the logic of this explanation—that is, the gradual progression from literacy-as-pathway to literacy-as-righteousness—I confess that, at least in my experience, the bias against the illiterate went deeper. I never consciously thought to myself, “They are illiterate; they are evil.” The bias had become entrenched in my society to the point that nothing needed to be said (although, believe me, plenty was).

The question, then, is how to remove this bias from society. I don’t know. Perhaps a more manageable question would be How do we stop the illiterate from thinking they’re evil? Time and time again, I run into people while teaching whose self-esteem is next to nothing. “I’m terrible at writing,” they say, apologizing profusely before we even begin reading their essays, and I wonder if it goes beyond the typical students’ nervousness. I wonder if, throughout their lives, they have been treated as morally deficient because of their lack of skills.

I have tutored students who, for their Eng 099 class, had to write papers about how their acquired literacy. I the time, I admit that I found the assignment somewhat pointless. Now, however, I see its worth: it convinces students of their worth.