Literacy in American Lives

by Deborah Brandt

Book Overview

Literacy in American Lives traces the changing conditions of literacy learning over the past century as they were felt in the lives of ordinary Americans born between 1895 and 1985. The book... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521003067
• ISBN13: 9780521003063
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A teacher of writing

A masterpiece in the field of literacy studies. A must-read for anyone concerned with education in this country or abroad.

One of the essentials

Literacy in American Lives is an astounding work that cuts across so many disciplines, you'll lose track. It's a remarkable social history, it's ethnography, biting social commentary, educational historiography, psychology, an essential resource for curriculum development. The book catches up with and defines that moving target: What is literacy? Certainly anybody who has anything to do with education, school boards, curriculum developing, funding for our schools, should read this book. Politicians, journalists, teachers, especially. The research is painstaking. Conclusions are vital and well-grounded. It reveals how the very institutions that are supposedly designed to foster literacy may actually be contributing to its uneven distribution by continuing historic patterns of discrimination, and how private interests continue to threaten to hijack our schools. And it reminds us, that's not the way it's supposed to be in our democracy.