Synopses & Reviews
The classic, indispensable guide for teachers, parents, and community organizers concerned with educating working-class children, Literacy with an Attitude dares to define literacy as a powerful right of citizenship. Patrick J. Finn persuasively debunks the time-honored paradigm for teaching poor and working-class students. Our job, he argues, is not to help such students to become middle class and live middle-class lives-most don't want it. Education rather should focus on a powerful literacy-a literacy with an attitude-that enables working-class and poor students to better understand, demand, and protect their civil, political, and social rights.
Table of Contents
1. Title, Author, and Hard-Bitten Schoolteachers -- 2. A Distinctly Un-American Idea: An Education Appropriate to Their Station -- 3. Harsh Schools, Big Boys, and the Progressive Solution -- 4. Oppositional Identity: Identifying "Us" as "Not Them" -- 5. The Lads -- 6. Changing Conditions - Entrenched Schools -- 7. Class, Control, Language, and Literacy -- 8. Where Literacy "Emerges" -- 9. Where Children Are Taught to Sit Still and Listen -- 10. The Last Straw: There's Literacy, and Then There's Literacy -- 11. Literacy with an Attitude -- 12. Not Quite Making Literacy Dangerous Again -- 13. Schools and a Square Deal for Working People -- 14. Citizens' Rights vs. Social Class and a Free-Market Economy: Acknowledging Conflict and Seeking Equity -- 15. Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Heirs to the Corresponding Societies and a New Paradigm for Educating Working-Class Students -- 16. Teachers Who Agitate: Freirean Motivation in the Classroom -- 17. Agitating Students and Students Who Agitate -- 18. Agitating Parents and Parents Who Agitate -- 19. Scaling Agitation Upward -- 20. Important Concepts and a Few Lines from Les Miserables.