A Reformist Political Culture For Literacy Educators

What is required, therefore, among progressive educators, is more of an appreciation for the historical given, which, as Harvey Graff puts it, "constitutes a series of opening moves rather than a delimiting or enclosing mode" (Graff, 1987, p. 2). An apprehension among radical educational scholars is that too much of an emphasis on existing reality reinforces the structuralist-functional view of consensual sociologists like Talcott Parsons whereby "the structure and ideology of the dominant society was rendered unproblematic" (Giroux, 1983, p. 73). Yet the emphasis on the historical given also has grounding in the more progressive, pragmatic and neo-pragmatic intellectual traditions grounded in the social thought of William James and John Dewey (Bernstein, 1983, 1986; Rorty, 1979, 1991; Kloppenberg, 1986). The social philosopher Richard J. Bernstein explains core elements of the pragmatic philosophy in his description of Dewey's concept of democracy:

We are always in media res, there are no absolute beginnings or finalities. We are always in the process of being shaped by and shaping our history and our traditions. We are eminently fallible. We never escape from the precariousness and contingency of existence. We become fools of history if we believe we can achieve total control by expert knowledge, or if we think we can collectively impose our wills and completely determine our destinies. Dewey had little patience with those who succumb to a nostalgia or longing for a 'golden era' that had never really existed, or with the type of utopian thinking that seeks to make a total break with existing realities. Both of these modes of thinking all too easily lead to despair. It was not adjustment to the status quo that Dewey advocated, but the constant challenging task of reconstruction (Bernstein, 1986, p. 267).

More simply put, Richard Rorty places the same slant on Dewey's social vision: "Dewey seems to me to have given us the right lead when he viewed pragmatism not as grounding, but as clearing ground for democratic politics" (Rorty, 1991, p. 13).

It is the creativity and "openness" inherent within the pragmatic perspective, grounded in the energies of lived experience out of which a more authentic democratic political culture may be reconstructed than from the neo-marxian or post-modern radicals in their preoccupation wit "deconstruction." It is within such a reformist framework that a realistic, but transformative adult literacy pedagogy might be based that resonates both with the constraints and the liberating potentialities inherent within the political culture of the United States. Transformation in this sense does not refer to a fundamental restructuring of prevailing socio-economic relations, which, pragmatically speaking, represents an unrealistic objective for such a stable nation as the United States. It refers, rather, to the very construction and reconstruction of reality as an on-going process in the unfolding stream of historical experience and the hope that such an evolutionary program will lead to greater "humanization." There can be, however, no guarantees.

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