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Bob Literacy and the Politics of Education Summary C. H. Knoblauch is the Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, and Associate Dean of undergraduate studies. He has also published essays in College English, CCC, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Eighteenth Century Studies, and Boundary 2, on top of writing “Literacy and the Politics of Education.” The focus of this particular work/essay was to trace different approaches to literacy and to establish that literacy is a concept that is emphasized by those who benefit from it. In his essay “Literacy and the Politics of Education,” Knoblauch shows how different definitions of “literacy” convey expectations concerning not only skills, but also values as well. His article discusses four types of literacy: the functionalist perspective, cultural literacy, literacy-for-personal-growth, and critical literacy. In writing this, he wanted to stress that each approach has an agenda and that these agendas should make us suspicious. To help get his answers, Knoblauch references articles from various writings of other literate authors throughout the essay helping to get his point across. The essay starts out with discussing how the labels literate and illiterate are sociocultural judgments laden with disapproval or pity about the character and place, the worthiness and prospects, of persons and groups. It then goes on to talk about how there is no uniformity of view of literacy and how the definitions of it are also rationalizations of its importance. Showing how social reality depends on literacy, Knoblauch uses the Middle ages as an example when he talks about how clerks back then were trained to read and write so they could keep accounts for landowners, merchants, etc. “Bureaucratic documentation wasn’t conceived so that people could acquire literacy” (452). He
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