Socratic Commitment and Critical Literacy [2008]

Connected to Deweyan speculations about critical intelligence, critical literacy took hold as a term in composition studies during the 1970s as the work of Paulo Freire gained ascendance and was engaged by scholars like Ann Berthoff (1987), Henry Giroux (1987), Donaldo Macedo (Freire & Macedo, 1987), and Ira Shor (1999). ¹ In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1970) writes the seemingly oxymoronic phrase, “freedom is acquired by conquest” (p. 31). However, he did not mean by conquest the subjugation of others. He meant that people had to work for freedom by recognizing the causes of their oppression, a recognition that is necessary to the task of social transformation. This heightened perception, or conscientizacao, is to be used to identify the specific social, economic, and political contradictions to be transcended. Freire understood that language is a crucial aspect of liberation because only through “naming the world,” imprinting one's own discursive construal on the environment, can one have a chance to participate in it on one's own terms. Education is deemed authentic, therefore, to the extent that it demands active student involvement and deliberately aids in the formation of student critical consciousness. “Authentic education,” Freire states classically, “is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B,’ mediated by the world — a world which challenges both parties giving rise to views or opinions about it” (p. 82). Literacy, in this view, is critical social practice, not the mere acquisition or transmission of technical skills. Or as Giroux (1987) elaborates, in the introduction to Freire and Macedo's volume Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, “Literacy is best understood as a myriad of discursive forms and cultural competencies that construct and make available the various relations and experiences that exist between learners and the world” (p. 10). Critical literacy is, he continues, “both a narrative for agency as well as a referent for critique” (p. 10). In an essay titled “What is Critical Literacy?” Shor (1999) adds, “Critical literacy can be thought of as a social practice itself and as a tool for the study of other social practices” (p. 10). When I think of the difference between functional literacy and critical literacy, I often recall little Pecola Breedlove of Toni Morrison's splendid first novel The Bluest Eye (1970). Pecola could decode the primer containing the dominant and dominating White, suburban, Dick-and-Jane narrative, but to her demise, she could neither deconstruct that story nor resist it.