Finn's Literacy with an Attitude: A Reflection and Some Connections

This text really bothered me, and honestly I think it started with that one sentence:

"There have been times in history when the prospect of literacy in the hands of the have-nots has been a source of endless angst among the haves. Less than one hundred years after the invention of the printing press laws were passed in England forbidding anyone under the rank of yeoman to read the Bible. Later, when political pamphleteers appeared, taxes were imposed to make pamphlets too expensive for the poor. But in America from colonial times universal literacy (except for slaves} has been the aim. Today we see illiteracy among the have-nots as the source of many social ills.

I get what the author is trying to do—situate literacy as something historically controlled by people in power—but the way he handles slavery feels completely unacceptable, even accounting for the fact that this was written in the 90s. Reducing 400 years of enslaving human beings to a quick parenthetical aside (“except for slaves”) isn’t just an oversight—it fundamentally weakens the argument. It makes it hard to take seriously anything that follows about inequality in schooling when race is treated as an afterthought rather than something deeply intertwined with class, access, and literacy itself.

Because that’s the issue for me—the article talks about working-class vs. middle-class vs. affluent schools as if those categories exist in isolation. But in reality, class is constantly intersecting with race, language, immigration status, and more. Ignoring that makes the analysis feel incomplete at best, and misleading at worst.

That said, I did find parts of the school descriptions really accurate. They actually made me reflect on my own experiences. At my progressive, liberal, and pretty affluent elementary school, learning felt like exploration—something we were empowered to do. There was this sense that knowledge was flexible, creative, and even joyful. Then at my middle-class Catholic school, the shift was noticeable. It felt much more structured, more about discipline and preparation—like we were being shaped into future workers who knew how to follow systems rather than question them.

And I think that’s where my bigger frustration with education systems comes in. So much of schooling feels designed to feed into a larger capitalist structure—sorting, training, and producing rather than liberating.

That’s why I keep coming back to Paulo Freire. His work—especially Pedagogy of the Oppressed—completely shifted how I understand education, international development and humanitarian work. Reading it during my first master’s program in international development was honestly transformative, and it’s a text I’ve gone back to again and again.

Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education really resonates here—the idea that students are just empty vessels waiting to have knowledge deposited into them. That model lines up perfectly with the kind of schooling that prepares people to fit into existing systems without questioning them. In contrast, his “problem-posing” approach is about dialogue, critical thinking, and co-creation of knowledge. It’s not just about learning facts—it’s about developing critical consciousness, or the ability to recognize and challenge injustice.

That’s also why it makes sense that his ideas are often seen as threatening. If education helps people question power, then of course those in power might try to limit or control it.

It also made me think of Precious Knowledge and the way those teachers used Freire’s ideas in practice—centering students’ identities, histories, and lived experiences, and treating education as a tool for empowerment rather than compliance. That kind of teaching pushes directly against the idea of education as neutral or purely academic.

We only read part of Finn, but I’m really curious how he continues to engage with Freire. Because to me, bringing Freire into this conversation actually exposes what’s missing in Finn’s earlier analysis—especially around race and the deeper purpose of education.

Overall, I think that tension is what I’m sitting with: literacy can be a tool for maintaining systems of power, or it can be a tool for challenging them. And which one it becomes depends a lot on whose experiences are centered—and whose are pushed into parentheses.

If you have not read Pedagogy of the Oppressed- I recommend you read ASAP! I am jealous of everyone reading it for the first time. If you just want a summary, this website is very helpful. 

https://proteanmag.com/2020/09/14/radical-education-an-introduction-to-paulo-freire/