Literacy in American Lives

This book addresses critical questions facing public education at the twenty-first century.

Deborah Brandt (Author)

9780521783156, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 May 2001

272 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.57 kg

"This book makes a significant contribution to literacy studies, and it deserves to be widely read. Brandt pushes us to reconsider many settled assumptions about how people learn to read and write, and she does it in lyrical prose that is a pleasure to read. I expect that we will be talking about and following the lead of her work for a long time." Rhetoric Review

This book traces the changing conditions of literacy learning over the past century as they were felt in the lives of Americans born between 1895 and 1985. The book demonstrates what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to successive generations of Americans and how they have responded to rapid changes in the meaning and methods of literacy learning in their society. Drawing on more than 80 life histories of Americans from all walks of life, the book addresses critical questions facing public education at the twenty-first century: What role does economic change play in creating inequality in access and reward for literacy? What is the human impact of the economy's growing reliance on the literacy skills of workers? This book gets beyond the usual laments about the crisis in literacy to offer an often surprising look into the ways that literacy is lived in America.

Introduction: the pursuit of liberty
1. Literacy, opportunity and economic change
2. Literacy and illiteracy in documentary America
3. Accumulating literacy: how four generations of one American family learned to write
4. 'The power of it': sponsors of literacy in African American lives
5. The sacred and the profane: reading vs. writing in popular memory
6. The means of production: literacy and stratification at the 21st century
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Child & developmental psychology [JMC]