ABSTRACT
These remarks, made in the first half of the twentieth century by the Italian social theorist, Antonio Gramsci, seem strangely at odds with the language and aspirations surrounding the current conservative and liberal debate on schooling and the “problem” of literacy. In fact, Gramsci’s remarks appear to both politicize the notion of literacy and at the same time invest it with an ideological meaning that suggests that it may have less to do with the task of teaching people how to read and write than with producing and legitimating oppressive and exploitative social relations. A master dialectician, Gramsci viewed literacy as both a concept and a social practice that must be linked historically to configurations of knowledge and power, on the one hand, and the political and cultural struggle over language and experience on the other. For Gramsci, literacy was a doubleedged sword; it could be wielded for the purpose of self and social empowerment or for the perpetuation of relations of repression and domination. As a terrain of struggle, Gramsci believed that critical literacy had to be fought for both as an ideological construct and as a social movement. As an ideology, literacy had to be viewed as a social construction that is always implicated in organizing one’s view of history, the present and the future; furthermore, the notion of literacy needed to be grounded in an ethical and political project that dignified and extended the possibilities for human life and freedom. In other words, literacy as a radical construct had to be rooted in a spirit of critique and project of possibility that enabled people to participate in the understanding and transformation of their society. As both the mastery of specific skills and particular forms of knowledge, literacy had to become a precondition for social and cultural emancipation.
