The summer of 1987 brought an important event in literacy education in the United States. Teaching students how and why different ways of reading can find different meanings in the same text can provide important experience in understanding and appreciating opposing perspectives. Learning about the many different kinds of writing and ways of thinking which are the subject matter of the language arts curriculum can expand the capacity of students to imagine and value worlds other than their own. The ability to communicate their views in oral and written form and to listen with comprehension to the views of others is also indispensable to citizens in a democratic society, and enhancing this ability is a major aim of language arts education. To prepare future teachers of English adequately for their profession, we must also acknowledge the dark side, in which democracy in literacy learning seems a distant dream at best.
Some English classrooms are frankly anti-democratic.
Citizens are not just disenfranchised in the political arena, they learn to be disenfranchised in school. Every bit as much as they modeled the Taylorism of the industrial workplace, schools promote a passive and undemocratic sense of learning and participation. . . . It should not surprise us that students educated in a system that strangles their creative participation mature into adults who feel they have nothing to contribute to our shared social domain. The convenient fiction that this passivity is new or the result of television simply overlooks the reality of classroom experience which is only now, and only occasionally, emerging from the dullness and repression of behaviorist pedagogies. At the same time that we work to prepare English teachers who will strive toward the ideals of students' active participation in the identification and solution of problems and issues both literary and political, we also work to sound the alarm that many thousands of students and teachers labor and learn in conditions that lead to the disenfranchisement and passivity lamented here by Bernard E. Alford and elsewhere by other educational critics.