those situations. At one level, Freire’s pedagogical experiments confirmed one of Kenneth Burke’s most important insights: that proverbs, which comprise a sort of linguistic shorthand for naming recurrent situations, constitute “strategies for dealing with situations” (Philosophy 296). For Burke as for Freire, names are never neutral. Before we can name anything, we must first size it up, “discern ‘the general behind the particular’ (301), and the name that we choose in turn implies an attitude toward it. Insofar as an attitude is an incipient act, language and politics are inextricably linked.
Educators have been reluctant to embrace the political dimension of critical literacy for obvious reasons. As witnessed by John Leo’s antipathy toward the “therapeutic,” “multiculturalist” political sympathies of college faculty, there is already a great deal of fear about the possibility that schools are indoctrinating instead of educating students. The fact that critical literacy belongs to an ancient tradition of education stressing that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and that it encourages such non-partisan virtues as self-reflection and self-questioning has not dissuaded some conservative critics from denouncing it as little more than a propaganda tool. While some of the more ardent proponents of critical literacy, like the truest believers in any cause, appear sometimes to believe that theirs is the one true faith and that non-believers are in league with the John Leo’s of the world, many of our most thoughtful practitioners and innovative teachers profess allegiance to critical literacy on largely pedagogical grounds.
Moreover, those who may be tempted to believe that by teaching students to challenge the status quo, question tradition and authority and think dialectically about the world they ensure a generation of students committed to progressive politics flatter themselves. Critical literacy is simply too complex an instrument to serve as a reliable tool of indoctrination. Its emphasis on how to think, on foregrounding processes and tacit understanding, combined with its skeptical attitude toward content and coverage, leaves entirely open the question of what students might do with their education. The very qualities of critical literacy that allow it to transfer so readily to other courses, that make it so adaptable to history, economics and sociology courses, are the very qualities that render it a flawed vessel of indoctrination. As Michael Berube reminds us, citing what he calls the principle of “reversibility,” there is no way to ensure that training students in advanced literacy can be “a unidirectional vehicle for political change” (145 Employment). Our most reflective thinkers may turn out to be hedge fund wizards as surely as they turn out to be political revolutionaries.
But beyond the fear of appearing partisan in our approach to teaching writing, there is a deeper animus toward the teaching of reflection that is not on the surface political. Philosopher Hans Blumenberg, for example, takes note of the increasing pressure on educators to set aside the goal of the examined life and to “abandon the idea . . . that is governed by the norm that man must know what he is doing” (446) in the name of finding ever more parsimonious means for solving problems. In response, Blumenberg calls for a turn to rhetoric, on the grounds that it represents “a consummate embodiment of retardation [of time]. Circumstantiality, procedural inventiveness, ritualization imply a doubt as to whether the shortest way of connecting two points is also the humane route from one to another” (446).
Blumenberg’s motive for turning to rhetoric here resonates with a theme that runs throughout Burke, who frequently expresses a skeptical attitude toward the Law of Parsimony and the “Occamite nonsense” (e.g., behaviorism and monetarism) that may arise from it: “For if much of service has been got by following Occam’s law to the effect that ‘entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,’ equally much of disservice has arisen through ignoring a contrary law, which we could phrase correspondingly: ‘entities should not be reduced beyond necessity” (Grammar 324). For Burke, the modern age is characterized far more by crimes against the second law than against the first. If critical thinking implies an ability to solve problems efficiently through simplification, critical literacy implies an ability to generate complexity through reflection. Moreover, it also entails an ability not only to write clearly when one can, but complexly when one must, to defer to an audience’s limitations when it serves one’s aims and to challenge and expand those limitations when deference would defeat those aims. While the ends we seek in critical literacy are lofty indeed, and while we have reached no consensus about how best to achieve them, it’s clear that teaching students how to write arguments is among the surest means of reaching them. In the process, the lessons students learn in an argument course undergirded by the principles of critical literacy are the surest to travel to other courses in the curriculum.
This last contention is borne out for many of us by our experience working in the area of writing across the curriculum. What many of us discovered when we spread out across the curriculum to help teachers in other disciplines improve their students’ writing was that we were actually in the business of helping their students write better arguments. Or to put the matter more precisely, we were helping faculty in other disciplines teach their students how to argue like members of a discipline as much as teaching them how to write like members of a discipline. Teaching the formats for essays in psychology or physics proved to be relatively simple. But making students aware of the assumptions embedded in those formats, assumptions about the relative evidentiary weight different formats accorded to primary and secondary sources, experimental data, theory, anomaly, etc., proved to be a considerably more challenging task.
We, the agents of WAC, were in effect reprising the role of our Sophist ancestors; we were the metics, the foreigners passing through a territory, simultaneously handicapped by our outsider status and empowered by it. What may have struck a member of a disciplinary community as a demonstration of truth looked to many of us, with our new eyes, like a persuasive gambit. Like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain who is surprised to learn that he has been speaking prose his whole life, many of our colleagues in other disciplines were surprised to learn that they had been using and teaching rhetoric the whole time. Once they achieved this awareness, many of these same colleagues became major proponents of a focus on argument not only in their own courses but in the writing courses we taught to prepare students for their disciplines. As we shall demonstrate in chapter two, the approaches used in contemporary argument courses, are eminently adaptable to other disciplines.
Argument and Identity
One of the more controversial aspects of critical literacy concerns the connections it draws between critical thought and identity. In urging students to become more reflective thinkers, proponents of critical literacy call attention to various forces in the world that undermine people’s sense of agency and entice them to pursue ends inimical to a healthy sense of self and community. They call attention to ways in which the decisions we make on a daily basis, as consumers, workers and citizens, decisions about what to eat, how to advance ourselves in the workplace and who to vote for, both reveal who we are and reinforce, for good or ill, our self-understanding. Sellers of soap, management gurus and political consultants all have an interest not just in understanding who we are, but in shaping a self congruent with their ends, not ours. Students need thus to be reflective about these choices, made aware of the implications of some of their choices, and alert to the persuasive gambits common to those who encourage them to assume these identities.
This can prove to be a challenging task. Students are often strongly resistant to an emphasis on the relationship between who they are the everyday choices they make. They do not like the implicit suggestion that they might be the dupes of some shadowy group of “hidden persuaders,” and they do not like the idea of having to pay so much attention to choices and decisions that heretofore have been effortlessly made. Aren’t we making a mountain out of a molehill, they suggest, to shower so much critical attention on a lowly ad or a selection from a pop business book? Anyone who has taught a literature course will recognize the response. They are skeptical that anything so simple on the surface could have all this depth of meaning. The various concerns that students express about applying the lessons of critical literacy to their everyday life need to be taken into account. On the one hand, they are right to insist on their own resourcefulness and their own ability to keep their distance from the identities being proferred them
