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PoAC: A little note on critical literacy
Oct. 16th, 2006 06:33 amThe literarily uncritical take texts (of all kinds - not just print) at face value. They fail to look for the author's point of view or bias. This is an immature and very dangerous outlook, because it leaves one with no resources to recognize or discredit bad information. Ensuring that my students do not grow up with this outlook is a big part of my job.
The first stage of critical literacy, however, is every bit as bad, and it's a lot more subtle. It's the stage at which the reader can identify a bias, can even point out all the evidence of a bias, but then makes a fundamental error: he uses the bias of the author as an excuse to discount everything the author has said. The reason this is bad: everybody has a bias. If you're going to throw out a work because its author is biased, then you're either throwing out everything or, more likely, you're choosing what to throw out based on what biases you agree with. You're judging the biases you disagree with as bad, and the ones you agree with as being unbiased and therefore good. Again, dangerous - there's no real criticism there. In fact, this is potentially more dangerous, because the person doing this believes himself to be critically literate. There's an inherent superiority in it which doesn't allow for learning. This attitude is the main reason why discourse stagnates - people run out of real arguments (or don't start out with any) and fall back on this. EDIT: This is also where the idea that "everyone has a bias, but not everyone lets it affect their work" comes in. That's not true. Sometimes people will try to keep their biases out of their work. Sometimes they won't. But whether or not they try, there will be bias in the work, and anyone who thinks they've found a "neutral" source has fallen into this trap.
The truly critically literate person recognizes one central fact of text creation: everyone has a bias. Bias is a slightly deeper synonym for point of view. It's the experiences, the knowledge, and the level of criticism that an author is bringing to their own text. The critically literate will then use that bias as a basis for evaluating the merits of the text itself.
For example: basal readers in the fifties generally included stories about men who went to work wearing suits, women who stayed at home with their children and had dinner on the table when their husband came home, and three or four children who had normal childhood problems like fighting with their sister. The text is biased, not in what it says but in what it doesn't say. It says that the families that count are the middle-class ones where Daddy wears a suit to work and Mommy cooks. It says that families that aren't white, aren't normal. It says a few other things, but one thing it doesn't say: it doesn't encourage the reader to look deeply for anything. It's a text about the surface of life. The author didn't critically evaluate it - or if he did, the evidence of that does not appear in the text itself.
The first group, the uncritical, immature readers, will look at this text and see nothing wrong with it. The second group will throw it out because it's so incredibly racist and classist, how can anything good come of it? The third group, however, will draw from it the attitudes that permeated mainstream culture in the fifties; they'll look for other texts that contradict this one from the same time period; they'll agree that there were, indeed, families like this, many of them, and their experience is no less valid because it wasn't complete for its time. They will look for what the text has to say, without expecting it to be a complete view of the time in which it was written. It's biased, of course. Everything is. That doesn't make it worthless.
*this post brought to you by the teacher in me, who is mildly disgusted with the so-called debate going on over in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
canpolitik, which tends to have the second problem.*
The first stage of critical literacy, however, is every bit as bad, and it's a lot more subtle. It's the stage at which the reader can identify a bias, can even point out all the evidence of a bias, but then makes a fundamental error: he uses the bias of the author as an excuse to discount everything the author has said. The reason this is bad: everybody has a bias. If you're going to throw out a work because its author is biased, then you're either throwing out everything or, more likely, you're choosing what to throw out based on what biases you agree with. You're judging the biases you disagree with as bad, and the ones you agree with as being unbiased and therefore good. Again, dangerous - there's no real criticism there. In fact, this is potentially more dangerous, because the person doing this believes himself to be critically literate. There's an inherent superiority in it which doesn't allow for learning. This attitude is the main reason why discourse stagnates - people run out of real arguments (or don't start out with any) and fall back on this. EDIT: This is also where the idea that "everyone has a bias, but not everyone lets it affect their work" comes in. That's not true. Sometimes people will try to keep their biases out of their work. Sometimes they won't. But whether or not they try, there will be bias in the work, and anyone who thinks they've found a "neutral" source has fallen into this trap.
The truly critically literate person recognizes one central fact of text creation: everyone has a bias. Bias is a slightly deeper synonym for point of view. It's the experiences, the knowledge, and the level of criticism that an author is bringing to their own text. The critically literate will then use that bias as a basis for evaluating the merits of the text itself.
For example: basal readers in the fifties generally included stories about men who went to work wearing suits, women who stayed at home with their children and had dinner on the table when their husband came home, and three or four children who had normal childhood problems like fighting with their sister. The text is biased, not in what it says but in what it doesn't say. It says that the families that count are the middle-class ones where Daddy wears a suit to work and Mommy cooks. It says that families that aren't white, aren't normal. It says a few other things, but one thing it doesn't say: it doesn't encourage the reader to look deeply for anything. It's a text about the surface of life. The author didn't critically evaluate it - or if he did, the evidence of that does not appear in the text itself.
The first group, the uncritical, immature readers, will look at this text and see nothing wrong with it. The second group will throw it out because it's so incredibly racist and classist, how can anything good come of it? The third group, however, will draw from it the attitudes that permeated mainstream culture in the fifties; they'll look for other texts that contradict this one from the same time period; they'll agree that there were, indeed, families like this, many of them, and their experience is no less valid because it wasn't complete for its time. They will look for what the text has to say, without expecting it to be a complete view of the time in which it was written. It's biased, of course. Everything is. That doesn't make it worthless.
*this post brought to you by the teacher in me, who is mildly disgusted with the so-called debate going on over in
canpolitik, which tends to have the second problem.*