Literacy: Reading The Word And The World

LITERACY Reading the Word & the World LITERACY Reading the Word & the World Paulo Freire & Donaldo Macedo London To Elza whose memory inspires hope, always First published in 1987 This edition first published in Great Britain in 1987 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo 1987 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism ISBN 0-203-98610-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-7102-1417-0 (Print Edition) Contents Foreword to this Edition by Margaret Meek Preface Foreword by Ann E.Berthoff Introduction Literacy and the Pedagogy of Political Empowerment by Henry A.Giroux Chapter 1 The Importance of the Act of Reading Chapter 2 Adult Literacy and Popular Libraries Chapter 3 Rethinking Literacy: A Dialogue Chapter 4 The People Speak Their Word: Literacy in Action Chapter 5 Literacy in Guinea-Bissau Revisited Chapter 6 The Illiteracy of Literacy in the United States Chapter 7 Literacy and Critical Pedagogy Appendix Letter to Mario Cabral Chapter Notes Bibliography Index vi ix xii 1 20 25 32 42 67 84 98 111 117 124 125 Foreword to this Edition by Margaret Meek Paulo Freire is best known for his challenging and therefore unsettling contributions to debates about theory and practice in the promotion of universal literacy. In this book he again confronts, and rejects, the assumptions of those in the dominant literate cultures who take for granted that the ability to read and write is both the cause and the effect of intellectual superiority. In so doing, he forces all teachers, whether they take responsibility for adult illiterates in the so-called Third World or teach children in primary schools anywhere, to look again at what literacy is. What are we helping students to learn? Why, exactly, do we think it is important that people should read and write? These essays catch us, the favoured traditional literates, at a time of general uncertainty and paradox. In our schools we lay great emphasis on literate activities, yet we know that many of our students will make their way without too much recourse to books and papers. Nevertheless, our whole economic life is soaked in the documents of transactions, yet most of these are conducted on screens and by telephones. Freire forces us to confront uncomfortable questions; if literacy is such an obvious benefit, why are there those in literate cultures who cannot read and write? Are they not simply the dispossessed? In all Freire’s writings the core of his argument remains the same: in literacy matters, the obvious is never as obvious as it seems. Implicit in each text is the necessary, but uneasy-making interrogation: why does literacy research and practice seem to ignore the social and ideological evidence of literate behaviour which is visible in the culture itself? When Cultural Action for Freedom (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) and Education: the Practice of Freedom (1978) were published in Britain, teachers of adult illiterates recognized in Freire someone who understood that literacy is not necessarily a universal benefit to be conferred on those who lack its advantages by those who have traditionally enjoyed them. From his point of vantage—his belonging to and identifyi