The author began writing this essay the day after waves of euphoria swept over what appeared to be a profoundly altered public space. Americans had seen the most diverse gathering of people coming freely together to affirm a common purpose no one could quite yet define. No one had instructed them to come out in the cold of that inauguration…

Calls into question whether the role of literacy and the function of schooling is to accommodate economic, social, and political structures. Examines multiple viewpoints of literacy and the difficulty of constructing a concept of literacy appropriate for diverse persons and changing circumstances. (SK)

The existential contexts of education reach far beyond the conceptions of Goals 2000 or the appalling actualities of family breakdown, homelessness, violence, and other "savage inequalities." Classroom encounters with the arts can move the young to imagine, extend, and renew. If the arts' significance for growth, inventiveness, and…

Signs or signifiers, composing what Lacan in 1968 called the "symbolic order," provide a means for making sense of the world and form a network enabling the human mind to form concepts. The signifier "literacy," for example, is often taken to refer to a fixed, isolatable concept, but this term would not be intelligible were it…

Argues that literacy, liberal education, higher learning, and similar terms should not be conceived as single or fixed ideas and should not be dissociated from the conversation of both scholars and ordinary people. (SRT)

Articulates two cornerstones of a vision of public education in the United States: (1) the need for community and for a coming together with something to pursue; and (2) the importance of the imaginative voice of the artists in human conversation. (CMK)

Includes "Texts and Margins" (Greene); "Arts as Epistemology: Enabling Children to Know What They Know" (Gallas); "To Arrive in Another World: Poetry, Language Development, and Culture" (Steinbergh); "The Uses of Folk Music and Songwriting in the Classroom" (Cockburn); and "And Practice Drives Me Mad;…