Teachers of Significance

Politics and Literature In her landmark essay, Literacy in Three Metaphors , Sylvia Scribner directs our attention a three-fold purpose in appropriating literacy skill and insight: adaptation, power, and grace.  Adaptation, she allows, features the work skills that students need in order to be able to adapt and survive; as with organisms within the metaphor of natural selection, literacy in this metaphor focuses on being able to survive in the "real world" and "work skills."  This metaphor dominates public discourse on literacy education at the present time because we have anxiety about the  shape that our knowledge economy is taking and where the jobs will be in 5-10 or more years.  This metaphor has swollen itself and has pushed aside two the metaphors which have constituted the fibre of our  culture and democracy.  We need again, to think about how language enshrines political power within the context of political rights, and we need to attend to the pe...