Making Use of the Literacy Debate: Literacy, Citizenship, and Brave New World Vol. 53, No. 1 (Fall 1990)

Abstract:[T]here are two competing ways to look at literacy: as information that one acquires—that can be taught to students—or as an ability that teachers can help students to develop…. [T]eachers of secondary and college-level reading and writing can respond to the literacy wars by examining and applying, with their students, the literacy theories under robust debate, thereby making awareness of the conflict part of students' mastery of literacy and of literary texts. Such spirited discussion of literacy itself can achieve goals on both sides in the literacy debate: both familiarity with the documents of our culture and ability to look analytically at those documents, to use literacy to influence the culture. To clarify this approach, I propose a reading of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that explores and tests some current theories of literacy.