How People Learn:
Brain, Mind,
Experience, and School
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BOX 6.1
Literacy: Then and Now
Colonists were literate enough if they could sign their name, or even an
X, on deeds. When immigrants arrived in large numbers in the 1800s,
educators urged schools to deliver "recitation literacy" to the foreign
children who filled the schoolrooms. That literacy was the ability to
hold a book and reel off memorized portions of basic American texts such
as the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, a part of
the Gettysburg address, or some Bryant or Longfellow. With the coming
of World War I, and the prospect of large numbers of men handling new
equipment in foreign countries, Army testers redefined reading.
Suddenly, to the dismay of men used to reading familiar passages,
passing the army reading test meant being able to make sense, on the
spot, of never-before-seen text. Currently, that kind of "extraction
literacy," revolutionary in 1914, looks meager. Finding out who, what,
when, where or how simply does not yield the inferences, questions, or
ideas we now think of as defining full or "higher literacy." The idea
of a classroom where young women, poor and minority students, and
learning disabled students all read (not recite) and write about
(not copy) Shakespeare or Steinbeck is a radical and hopeful departure
from the long-running conception of literacy as serviceable skills for
the many and generative, reflective reading and writing for the few
(Wolf, 1988:1).
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