Content area
Full Text
The concept of "intelligence" was powerfully debunked by Gould (1981) in The Mismeasure of Man. He argued that intelligence was a complex range of illusive characteristics and skills, falsely reified by science and reduced (through arbitrary, unscientific, and prejudicial processes) to a single number, the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). Gould chillingly described how IQ scores ascribed inaccurate labels, which were used as the basis for assigning status and stigma consistent with existing race, class, and gender hierarchies in society. Gould recalled Socrates' earlier attempt to create a logical and convincing explanation for assigning stable stratified social ranks. Socrates asserted that God framed the citizens differently; some composed of gold, some of silver, and some of brass. Based on these constitutions, differential statuses could be conferred. Further, Socrates maintained that people who might be unconvinced initially would come, over generations, to unquestioningly believe and blindly accept their undeserved fate.
THE MISMEASURE OF LITERACY
When considering the question of what matters in literacy, striking parallels with Gould's work came to mind. The concept of "literacy," especially intensified by the current conservative political climate, has similarly been falsely reified as a clearly distinct "thing" that we can teach and test in simple and standardized ways. Literacy is reduced to numerical reading scores, percentiles, and grade levels, which are used to sort, privilege, and deprive students. Literacy assessments, like the IQ scores examined by Gould, though pitifully inadequate and culturally biased, provide the data for the Foucauldian dividing practices that dominate our education system. Literacy has become a site for playing out the unjust social arrangements of hierarchy and inequity in our educational institutions where minoritized and marginalized "others" predictably fail. And sadly, as in Socrates' fabricated myth, individuals and their families frequently accept their institutionally ascribed and often fallacious status with little question.
I come to the study of literacy from an anthropological and sociolinguistic perspective, a perspective that I believe helps unravel and debunk prevailing literacy myths and misuses. Ethnographic studies of...