>1) Much of the reading they did they did collectively, even out loud in
>study groups. (Twenty years ago I read _Wages, Price and Profit_ onto
>tape, since there were several people in the study group who had only a
>high school education and did not read very well. They did very well
>indeed when they could read and listen at the same time.)
:) I had the pleasure of designing and defending my own degree program in
college. I wanted to take a course in Am Lit. I bartered childcare and,
crunched for time, I would read Mark Twain to them--they were 2 and 3. They
loved it and I realized how great it was to read Twain aloud. I told my
tutor who replied: "Twain was meant to be read aloud (or something to that
effect) and many people could only 'read' him by attending readings.
>2) They had not been convinced by an education that emphasized writing
>and grammar that they were illiterate and it wasn't worth trying to
>read. As Joanna herself has noted before, she is in the working class.
>And she seems quite literate! Skill in writing (as taught, and perhaps
>fundamentally) is a special skill, not necessarily (or at all) related
>to either intelligence or ability to read complex texts.
I think Joanna def. meant working class as in 98% of people. After all, she asked if Sun Engineers would join a poetry reading group today.
As for Joanna's point, which was that contemporary schooling sucks the desire for knowledge out of people, I think that's a good point. _Diverted Dream_ traces the history of the rise of community colleges (and briefly discusses the ways high schools become vocationalized and tracked, to keep the poor and people from the manual laboring classes from desiring a liberal arts education.) The community colleges were the brainchild of the elite universities who wanted to keep the unwashed masses out--during the progressive era there were increasing calls from these folks for broad, liberal arts learning. But, public schooling was seen as something to train workers (massive immigration at the time) and turn them into docile, laboring bodies.
Kelley
>Carrol
>
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