Preface

“In many ways, The Struggle to Continue is my reaction to Broken Promises, a book in which I argue that the influence of science and business is the cause rather than the solution to the problems of U. S. reading instruction during the 20th century.”  (1990)

That’s the opening sentence of the first edition, and twenty-five years later, I’m still proud of the ideas and analysis behind it.  Broken Promises (1989) offered a critical argument that technological and commercialized reading instruction failed to deliver on its promises to be a catalyst for social mobility and civic engagement for all Americans.  Rather it alienated teachers and students from the work that reading can do, denying the types of literacy needed to demystify schooling and the inequalities of American society.  In Reading Against Democracy (2007), I updated that argument, adding that state and federal government funding and policies on reading instruction are complicit in the reproduction of a culturally, politically, and economically stratified society. 
             Closer Readings of the Common Core (2013) provided a single example of how the nexus of these three influences has delivered reading instruction as a cash cow to entrepreneurs at many levels without addressing those unjust consequences.  Reading Poverty (2014) took up the politics surrounding the fact that despite a century of reading research and billions of dollars invested annually in reading education students from low income families (Carnoy & Rothstein, 2013) -- confounded by race (Vigdor, 2011), immigrant status (Schwartz & Stiefel, 2011) and segregated location (Burdkick-Will et al., 2011) -- continue to “struggle” with school reading.  Although some schools have made modest improvements (Rowan, 2011), the overall income achievement gap has increased by 40 percent since the Reagan Administration (Reardon, 2011).
             I’ve closed each book with calls for critical agency from “reactors and resisters,” “critical educators,” and “radical democrats,” offering examples of people who refused to stand by silently while witnessing the effects of the hyperrationalization of reading lessons and profit motives on students and teachers.  These agents used reading instruction to act in and on their schools, communities, and society in order to awaken and develop people’s curiosity, creativity, compassion, skepticism, imagination, and agency.  These examples were additional steps toward making good on the promises of reading in a democracy, but from book to book, they were not connected to the century long progressive traditions in reading education in the United States, leaving the possible impression that these current acts were disjointed and isolated events.  This revision of The Struggle to Continue makes those connections explicitly and extends the three important elements from the original edition in new ways.
             First, I name and update the continuities and conflicts in the philosophies and practices among the women and men who worked singly and collectively to make reading a tool for the pursuit of personal and collective interests, desires, and needs.   These agents are connected by their intentions to disrupt the binaries of mind and body, nature and nurture, and self and society, providing a not always linear path among the praxis of Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Caroline Pratt, George Counts, Septima Clark, Ken Goodman, Lisa Delpit, Henry Giroux, Vivian Vasquez, Kevin Leander and Gail Boldt, and Ernest Morrell.  We’ll walk that path together.
             Second, I use examples from reading lessons covering a 130-year span and much of the country from Quincy, MA to San Diego, CA and Milwaukee, WI to Fairhope, AL. Although teachers and students have needed and will continue to need to develop appropriate curriculum and pedagogy for their particular circumstances, they could and can build upon the successes of progressive others.  Those who seek alternative forms of reading instruction currently are not alone, odd, negative, or even necessarily innovative.   Often unconsciously, they have and will continue to follow and expand a deep tradition within the history of American education.
             Third, I suggest coalitions among the various practitioners of the current innovations in progressive reading instruction, using Nancy Fraser’s (2009) articulation of social justice – parity of participation - as a contingent framework.   Fraser argued:
            
             According to this radical-democratic interpretation of the principle of equal         moral worth, justice requires social arrangements that permit all to          participate as peers in social life.  Overcoming injustice means dismantling        institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from participating on a        par with others, as full partners in social interaction. (16)

 Fraser identified these obstacles as lying within three overlapping dimensions:  economic, cultural, and political.  Since its origins in the middle of the 17th century and through its expression in the 21st, progressive educators acted to distribute many forms of capital more equitably among all groups; to recognize the legitimacy of all with their capacities to think, learn, and act; and to represent individuals and groups across the geographic scales of the decisions that affect their lives.   For example, John Amos Comenius’ Great Didactic (1657) argued for a universal “climate of literacy” across social classes, genders, and languages, allowing the literate to “find themselves all the fitter to use their understanding, the powers of action, and their judgment” (421).  In 2014, Ernest Morrell explained, “it’s difficult because we’re teaching in an era where we are being evaluated upon constantly changing criteria….that’s why I think we need to celebrate teachers who are producing self-actualizing seriously literate students who are poised to become authentic and powerful participants in our multicultural democracy….”(15).
             The time between these acts might seem long, and the distance is far; but the politics display similar commitments to reading instruction as a progressive social force for justice within societies built on privilege and profit.  Theirs is a struggle to join and continue.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”  (Douglass, 1857)

 
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