ABSTRACT
Education and reading are political. They are wrapped up in power relations leading us, and being led by us, to points of domestication and liberation in not always linear or complementary ways. Reading education, then, must be political as well because it serves as a site of struggle in which groups vie to realize their visions of the past, present, and future of learning to be literate. Each iteration of education, reading, and reading education presupposes not only a conception of what is real, and therefore, true, but also a set of political relations that enable the truth to become manifest. At one level, the struggles are discursive, the definitions and meanings of the terms are debated, confirmed, and debated again. At another level, bodies are in motion to secure the policies, institutions, and technologies required to put some sets of definitions in place. Against powerful forces, the Goodmans have operated on both levels of this struggle for over fifty years.
