Autonomous Text, Autonomous Literacy, Autonomous Humanity

The Ghost in the Machine

Jul 13, 2022

After a whirlwind of unstructured experiences as a neophyte student/writer/teacher in the late 1970s and 1980s—private reading clinics, a psychiatric prison, military bases, community college remedial courses, an avalanche of English composition courses, an adult literacy project—I was on alert for a vision, a theory, a point of view.

Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed1 became a conceptual anchor around 1983. I carried a copy with me, underlined almost every sentence, filled a steno notebook on both sides with scribbles. Oppression and its hand maiden, Hegemony, explained much of the struggle and the failure I witnessed, not everything, not Paul, not Dean, not Steve and his cohort who locked their minds in darkness. Biology and madness reached beyond the model.

The “banking model” of education, however, served me well as conceptual metaphor and then expanded to the “factory model,” a controlled systematic model with a conveyor belt equipped to separate and segregate substandard products. The system served the oppressor and guaranteed a pliant population.

The problem of failure to read and write among the students in the reading lab at Solano College was political, not technical, socially reproduced inequality with an Origo in the American macro structure. I saw no students working at the X standard of literacy, few with serious phonological processing problems, no psychopathic killers.

The problem of failure to read and write among the students in the reading lab at Solano College was political, not technical, socially reproduced inequality with an Origo in the American macro structure.

Within a few years I would augment my emerging understanding with a third side to the triangle: Power, Hegemony, Literacy. Brian Street, whom I came to read in courses at UC Davis in the mid-1980s, distinguished between an “autonomous” model and an “ideological” model of literacy.

Seen as a free-standing, self-contained, technical human app one perfects through proper training, available in all known languages, once installed in the brain, autonomous literacy operates generically much like breathing, a machine with an on-off switch one learns to use at a high level regardless of context, intention, historical formation, or shared values and beliefs. Teachers assign, students read, teacher talks, students test. Bank accounts swell.

Distinguishing between literacy practices and literacy events, Street used ethnography as a method to study reading and writing events carried out in webs of power relations enacted as social practice—literacy in Florida, in Utah, in Texas, in New York, in the airport, in the synagogue, in the hospital.

School literacy in the Western world is a collection of literacy practices shaping events electrified with life-altering power. Assigning a text to a student to read is not a straightforward matter of assigning the task of decoding the words and requiring a standardized mental model of its meaning.

Embedding assignments in contexts of academic power changes everything. School language is privileged; reading to pass tests or to demonstrate knowledge becomes a habit of mind. Ways of reading and writing, whole genres of reading and writing, are delegitimized. Knowledge is a predefined commodity legitimated by a credentialed professional.

A bill2, which some opponents have called "Don't Say Gay," was signed by DeSantis of Florida in late March, 2022. It reads as follows: “Instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."3

The Trevor Project4, a non-profit with a website designed to connect counselors with people struggling in an environment hostile to the right to live outside a closet, would likely be illegal if it were referenced by “school personnel” or “third parties.”

The following quote (Apple, 1993) was published in the context of a discussion of power in relation to formal schooling and how decisions about “…what we regard as ‘real’ and important” (p.45) in the curriculum are made. The political Right in all of its flavors has long pulled the levers of the textbook industry to assemble a right knowledge delivery system:

“Thus, education and power are terms of an indissoluble couplet. It is at times of social upheaval that this relationship between education and power becomes most visible (p.46).”5

Literacy in Composition Studies (LiCS), a refereed open access online journal, published a special issue on 2021 titled “Against Autonomous Literacies: Extending the Work of Brian V. Street.” In the introduction to the collection, the editors wrote the following6

‘[Autonomous models of literacy give] the powerful a pretext for affirming dominant cultural understandings of literate practices while subordinating others. Institutionalized, autonomous models uphold oppressive systems by legitimizing occlusion of access to disciplinary spaces for people with diverse life experiences. They are in these ways inimical to our recognition of the many ways of knowing that support human flourishing. We believe it is imperative for research, practice, and policy in composition, literacy, and writing studies to combat autonomous views of writing.”

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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