Functional Literacy and Its Discontents: How Limiting Literacy Disturbs Democracy

Basing my paper around The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I want to talk about undereducation and the idea of 'functional literacy' as a way those in power educate people just enough to be workers and soldiers, perpetuating the current economic and social practices as well as defending them militarily, but not enough to participate in metadiscourse, to critique the dominant culture-- ultimately because it is easier to mobilize citizens to fight other nations or see one another or irrelevent external peoples as enemies if you can convince them, through supposition, that there is not a war going on within their own nation, if you make them believe most of them are not on the front lines of it every day. This argument will be centered of Freire's theories of banking education as a pedagogy of domination that works towards imprinting the oppressed majority with the idoelogy of the people in power. I want to center my paper on Karl Rove's quote that: "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." Furthermore, I want to discuss the instructional methods and methods of assessment (particularly standardized testing) which produce a complacent population rather than inciting a critically engaged one.

Writings from the class that I would consider in order to Freire would be Gee, Gere, and perhaps a little something from Bartholomae. Other texts I have been reading or plan to read in the next week that I might bring into my writing-thinking process for this would be We Make the Road By Walking: A Conversation (between Myles Horton and Paulo Freire) of Education and Social Change, some of James A. Berlin's thoughts on rhetoric, writing, and culture (especially as it relates to literature and composition studies) and as many of bell hooks' books on Teaching to Transgress, Teaching Community, and Teaching Critical Thinking as I can get through in the next week or so that school is slowed down to celebrate genocide. I hope this paper is required to be substantially longer than the others because I perceive my brain exploding with ideas.