s, rather than empowered working-class men and women.
In 1970 Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed popularized the term “critical literacy” (so called because of Freire’s adherence to Marxist critical theory). Freire’s literacy programs for adults in Brazil’s slums started with raising students’ consciousness of the structural inequalities that oppressed them and preparing them, largely through literacy, to strive for justice. Critical reading (recognizing the author’s bias and so on) has been standard reading instruction for at least fifty years. It is sometimes referred to as critical literacy, but it falls a little shy of education based on critical theory. Following Allan Luke, critical literacy as an explicitly political classroom agenda for the education of working-class students, devoted to changing class relations in ways that are advantageous to the working class. It brings Mother Jones into the classroom, not as a benign topic of study but as an inspiration and model of good citizenship.
The most enduring experiment in critical literacy for school aged children in the U.S. took place not in public schools but in Sunday schools operated by the American Socialist Party. Socialist Sunday schools served children between age 5 and 14 in many cities, between 1900 and 1920. Students were exposed to an abundance of working-class poetry, music, theater, and dance. Visits from labor, community, and political leaders provided them with social capital and encouraged students to have confidence and pride in working-class values, knowledge, and beliefs. Like Freire’s literacy campaigns, the schools aimed to raise students’ consciousness regarding the structural inequalities that oppressed them and to prepare them to strive for justice. Students were encouraged to cooperate and work hard in public school to acquire high-status knowledge, cultural capital, and high levels of literacy, not simply for their intrinsic value but as sources of power in the social-political-economic arena. This was later dubbed Machiavellian Motivation.
Students learned that capitalism without an organized, powerful working class produces things like poverty, unemployment, unsafe work, and child labor and that these phenomena cannot be solved through individual effort. They are societal (structural) problems that demand collective solutions. So instead of quitting a job that doesn’t pay a living wage, students learned that they should pursue collective actions like starting or joining unions.
Critical literacy has found a home in some working-class public schools today, where teachers have designed lessons that reflect the values taught in the Socialist Sunday schools of a century ago. Consider these examples:
- A fifth grade teacher organizes a field trip where students interview striking workers on a picket line and then write about what they learned.
- Tenth grade students studying the forced removal of American Indians from the southeast to west of the Mississippi known as The Trail of Tears share individual accounts of times when they were oppressed because they were youths, females, minorities, and/or working-class. In a “writing circle” they turn these accounts into a collective narrative of oppression and identify the steps they could take to prevent further oppression, like joining forces with others in the same spot and looking for powerful allies.
- In a high school where most working-class Hispanic students take “basic” classes while affluent, white students take honors classes, some affluent white students agree to have a Hispanic student “shadow” them and to talk about their plans for after high school. The Hispanic shadow students then compare the stark differences between their own classes and life expectations and those of their affluent classmates. This gives the Hispanic students a glimpse into structural injustice. It also illustrates Machiavellian motivation: some of the Hispanic students later push to gain admission to honors courses.
Critical literacy educators, like Socialist Sunday school teachers, endeavor to produce three ki