An example of the withholding of literacy by sponsors in the lives of students is in A Child’s Education, where author MaryKate Fitzgerald explores where literacy is indicative of success. In this, the narrator discusses a situation in which a teacher withholds literacy by segregating them from the other students, in class and out, and suggesting a tutor for them; Fitzgerald writes, “The thought of this irked me, making me think I was less intelligent than all the other kids who didn’t need to spend time with a tutor.” This gets right into what I find to be the most important aspect of the story: How this withholding of literacy impacted the student personally. In society today, success is often viewed as having a strong correlation with the acquisition of literacy; as Kara Poe Alexander explores in Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: “Master” and “Little” Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre, too often today we find people “buying into the trop that literacy leads to enlightenment and liberation.” (Alexander 610) In Fitzgerald’s case, the mere fact she could not associate with the other students lead to a feeling of being separate, and almost trapped in this state of being illiterate. This, by deduction, implies that the acquisition thereof would lead to a state of freedom in the mind of the narrator, with their illiterateness being a mere trap of the sponsor. Additionally, Deborah Brandt explores this in Sponsors of Literacy, in which she writes that “People’s literate skills have grown vulnerable to unprecedented turbulence in their economic value, as conditions, forms, and standards of literacy achievement seem to shift with almost every new generation of learners,” (Brandt 166) meaning that this situation is likely similar to many others, but also different as each individual defines their own perspective on how valuable that literacy is to them.
But sometimes the damage done by sponsors can run deeper. In Reading Gone Wrong by Shaylee Amidan, she explores how the withholding of literacy from one by a sponsor can damage their views on their personal life and passions. She talks about how “so many people are shot down for being different by their own choice..” The choice being, how one goes about their journey to literacy, and how too often some sponsors will withhold, or attempt to define this long and winding road for someone. Deborah Brandt explores this in Sponsors of Literacy, in which she writes that “A focus on sponsorship can force a more explicit and substantive link between literacy learning and systems of opportunity and access.” (Brandt 169) In Amidan’s case, her restriction from literacy by the hand of the teacher caused her to feel like she was not connected to the global literacy, or that she couldn’t form that “link” between literacy learning and opportunity to grow and be a part of the rest of the class, so to speak. But again, this unestablishment of literacy can and did cause problems for Amidan, and as Kara Poe Alexander explores in Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: “Master” and “Little” Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre, “Costs include social, cultural, and permanent displacement which leads people to alienation, [and] despair.” (Alexander 610) In Amidan’s case, this despair goes hand-in-hand with the fact that she felt alienated from the rest of the class; that she was not on the same intellectual level as other students for her need for a tutor.
On this page, I am drawing connections to other scholarly articles and detecting themes of the paper.
