Week 2: The "Pull" and the "Push"

Historically, the major agent of literacy in America according to Deborah Brandt not until recently had been the church and state where people were taught the morals of the society through reading and writing. She says that “missionaries, conquerors, conscriptors, and nation builders throughout time imposed literacy and literacy teaching as part of the mass conversion of hearts and minds for their causes, just as resistors, critics, heretics, and revolutionaries could use literacy to withstand or transform indoctrination” (27). At this period, literacy had been most of the time for selfish interests like what the resistors did unlike the missionaries whose purpose was focused on inculcating morals and culture of the society into learners by conversion of hearts. However, at that point, the drive to pull and push mass literacy with attention to material and cultural conditions became necessary. In order to achieve this, investigators were involved. They seek an understanding of both the “pull” of literacy (i.e., the various economic, political, and social factors that induced literacy use or denied it), and the “push” for literacy (i.e., the motivations, aspirations, and writing), (27). At this stage no doubt, there were confusions whether some of these factors such as religion, imperialism, occupations, population density, slavery, urbanization, commercialization, democratization, schools, political stability and so many others could be responsible for the pull or push of mass literacy. It would be interesting to know that at the end of the so called investigation, there were more confusion and disagreements as historians variously emphasize one factor over another (27), and that became one of the problems of literacy as Brandt quoting Blanket claims that, the causes of literacy are extremely difficult to apply (27). It is also worthy of note that at that time, there were conspicuously lots of inequalities in the society where women literacy was compared to the snail movement as opposed to the rapid growth of literacy of the men (my emphasis). Not only that, black folk’s literacy grew more slowly than the whites (29). But the growth of literacy as Brandt agues depends on regions. In other words, some regions had more literacy abundance than others.