Several years ago, I “dropped out” of school. Feeling uneasy about my decision, I wrote a journal entry around that time detailing the “intangible strengths” (as I had called it then) I possessed and had gained through my partial undergraduate education. While lamenting the idea that I would fend through my future without even a 4-year degree, I counted my qualities that I felt would ensure that I would not be without “opportunities.” The qualities I numbered off where my own amateur renderings of many of the forms of “reading capital” defined within the Compton-Lilly reading.
It wasn’t without guilt that I acknowledged that—although I was embarking on a struggle (trying to “make it” without completing my degree)—I was privileged. I was privileged in the way that I was relatively rich in “capital”—particularly, to use Compton-Lilly’s terms, in ‘embodied reading capital’ and ‘economic reading capital’ (I owned and had read a lot of the “right” books, and also had a laptop/internet access, which I could use to help replace the ‘social reading capital’ I was depriving myself of by dropping out of school). I felt that my ‘objectified reading capital’ was above average for non-academic settings; I acknowledged that I would still stand out as a more attractive “choice” to many employers when compared against other applicants who may have only a high school education—or less—or who may possess stigmatized qualities of marginalized communities. Though I didn’t believe I would be completing my education at the time, I knew that I “seemed” educated, and that it would be a vital advantage to me without a college degree. I had titled this journal entry “Survivor’s Guilt.”
This “survivor’s guilt” has long existed in me, though in less conscious ways. When I was an elementary student at MPS, I was often favored by my teachers, and I was a special favorite of the principal of the school (he pulled me out of my fifth-grade class one day to commend my writing abilities and to encourage me to develop them). At the time, as a child, I had an awareness that I had advantages that many of my classmates didn’t (being from a white family that raised me under a lot of middle-class influences). Even in my own family, as the oldest child, my dad told me that he and my mom read to me continuously for the first few years of my life. They tried to do the same with my brother, but, since he was the second child, they didn’t have as much time to read to him as they had to me. My sister, as the third child, had even less reading time with my parents. My dad commented to me that he noticed a trend, and worried that it was because of the different amounts of reading attention each of us had received: I was the best and most enthusiastic reader, while my brother had a lukewarm interest in reading, and my sister wasn’t very interested at all. As a child, I felt simultaneously lucky and concerned for my siblings.
As I got older, though, I began to take these advantages in my early life for granted, and for awhile believed that I had a special inherent “skill” or “gift” for reading and writing. My pride flared in sixth grade, when my mom reported that my Language Arts teacher had praised my reading comprehension at parent-teacher conferences, and had noted that I was the only student in the class to make frequent use of the classroom library. In high school, I was able to ‘effortlessly’ get high grades on many of my papers and reports, thanks to my ability to produce papers high in ‘objectified reading capital.’ I finished high school, and began college, cultivating an ‘elitist’ attitude about reading. I felt a sense of superiority for “naturally gravitating” to more complex texts with high social status—texts that many of my peers had no interest in, and didn’t seek out themselves. I felt a sense of superiority for finding meaning and enjoyment in assigned texts that my peers didn’t seem to have much of an appreciation for (or understanding of). I began to enjoy referencing texts that were unfamiliar to most of my peers—admittedly, I enjoyed the feeling of displaying my exclusive knowledge, and forming cliquish bonds with people who shared it.
Thankfully, UWM promotes more progressive views about education. While I think I am, deep-down, NOT someone who generally desires to dominate over others, I think in my first year of college, I was impressionable enough that I could have been consumed by these immature, elitist attitudes if I had happened to attend to a school that encouraged them. As time went on, I found myself in classes that were impressively pretty even-handed in applying value to the contributions of all class members, despite the relative “reading capital” they may (or may not) have possessed in our classroom. I began to see that my teachers in the English Department weren’t searching for the “right” answer so much as they were trying to teach students to engage with texts, and derive their own meanings from them in their own ways. I saw that independent thinking was valued above “elitist” and “exclusive” attitudes and behaviors.
This class has absolutely fortified, and has definitely expanded, the more temperate regard I have taken towards reading and writing (and therefore “literacy”) in the past several years. I am extremely thankful for that, too, as someone who is pursuing a degree in English Lit. Throughout the course of the semester, I have been confronted with articles that have promoted the idea that reading/writing is more valuable and successful when it is accessible (or made accessible) to a diverse number of people. Academic writing and criticism about canonical literature can easily feed a student’s inclination to try and ‘mimic’ the specialized language, therefore contributing to sustaining it (the specialized language) and enforcing it. Before reading the articles particularly by Bartholomae, Eubanks & Schaeffer, and Gee, I think I would have based my academic “career” more closely off of standards long-sustained by ‘academia,’ without fully realizing the ways that I would be limiting myself, and limiting the potential I have to communicate ideas to others.
To date, the most valuable reading to me personally has been the one by Compton-Lilly. This article has fully addressed the intuitive sense of “privilege” I have acknowledged about my own literary abilities, and I think that reading it has forever put to rest any lingering advantage or favor I may have been prescribing to ‘high’ reading capital in others, and therefore dismissing what I perceive to be ‘lower’ reading capital. It has helped me realize the extent to which society excludes people for many superficial reasons. Compton-Lilly's case study has helped me the most to understand that “literacy” is not static, and should not be something that is gauged and used to define and categorize (and therefore limit) a person; rather, it is something fluid, subjective, and interactive, and my job, as someone who wants to base a profession off of writing and reading, will be to join in enabling others to connect with my writing, as well as other writings I am (or will become) knowledgeable about. I am happy to say that the misguided aspirations of my 18-year-old self (reminiscent of a young Richard Rodriguez!), to ascend to some “higher” level in society, and isolate myself from everything beneath it, are dead. They have been replaced by a more constructive and inclusive way of writing-doing-being-valuing-believing in the world. :-)
(thirtyspokes=Sarah Miller)
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