otivation.
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 kinds of “graduates”:
1) Working-class men and women who have the understanding and motivation to participate in collective action to improve the lot of the working class (in unions, for example)
2) organic intellectuals who are able to get a deep understanding of socialist theory and still talk to workers in a language they can understand
3 ) a particular kind of border crosser—one who will never cross a picket line or become a follower of Ayn Rand.
Critical literacy educators provide working-class students with a new kind of motivation to acquire the language and communication skills and the knowledge that will make them powerful members of a powerful working class. That is what critical literacy is all about. I believe students in Socialist Sunday schools would have done quite well on standardized academic achievement tests if they had them back then.
Patrick J. Finn
Patrick J. Finn is Associate Professor Emeritus of Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York and the author of Literary with an Attitude:Educating Working-Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest.