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Literacy and Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2008

Elsa Auerbach
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Extract

The past decade has seen increasing acceptance of the perspective that there can be no disinterested, objective, and value-free definition of literacy: The way literacy is viewed and taught is always and inevitably ideological. All theories of literacy and all literacy pedagogies are framed in systems of values and beliefs which imply particular views of the social order and use literacy to position people socially. Even those views which paint literacy as a neutral, objectively definable set of skills are in fact rooted in a particular ideological perspective, and it is precisely because they obscure this orientation that they are most insidious. In fact, as Fairclough (1989) argues, one of the primary mechanisms of social control is the “naturalization” of institutional practices which legitimize and perpetuate existing power relations.

Type
Foundations of Literacy
Information
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , Volume 12 , March 1991 , pp. 71 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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