In this historical study of English teaching, Jory Brass adopts a governmentality perspective to highlight the contingency and limits of pedagogical arguments that construct an oppositional relation between power and freedom. In the first part of the essay, Brass historicizes contemporary critiques of transmission pedagogies by comparing them with…

"Illiterate America," a book by Jonathon Kozol is used as a platform to propose an alternative model of functional literacy which does not adjust the disadvantaged to the status quo, but enables them to acquire intellectual access to their world and their place within that world. (MT)