The first chapter of Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives emphasizes how changing economic conditions and regional restructuring affected the opportunities people had for learning to read and write.
Brandt discusses the lives of two women who acquired literacy in a farming family economy during different eras to illustrate many of these important points.
Both women graduated high school but the one from 1903, Martha Day, became a journalist while the woman from 1971, Barbara Hunt, became a cashier at a local grocery store.
However, by the second half of the twentieth century, the influence of the popular press in literacy sponsorship was diminishing so the same opportunities were not available to Barbara Hunt when she was searching for an occupation after graduating high school.
[2] According to Brandt, "Direct market relations between individuals gave way to corporate-style activity – a growth in bureaucratic structures, interdependence, planning, restrictions on the flow of information, and other forms of control, all based largely on written and other symbol-based instruments."
Brandt provides and analyzes two extended case studies from individuals living in the 1970s and 1980s to illustrate the impact of literacy sponsorship during this period.
One individual is Dwayne Lowery, an auto worker turned union representative, and the other is Johnny Ames, a sharecropper who first learned to read and write during the 16 years he spent in a maximum security prison.
To keep pace with the demands on his literacy skills, Lowery attended numerous workshops to better learn how to read and write contracts.
In Ames's case, he was able to overcome the enormous disadvantage of failing to learn to read and write in childhood due to an uncommon institutional sponsor of literacy, the penitentiary system.
Although Ames's case is not typical, Brandt presents it to demonstrate the impact of historical and political events on literacy learning.
The examples of Lowery and Ames further serve to illustrate how literacy learning is often a by-product of one's struggle for economic and political ascendancy.
Key influences that are analyzed throughout the family members' narratives include the heritage of traditional nineteenth-century literacy in rural Midwestern conservative societies, changes in agriculture before and during the Great Depression, World War II and the desire for technological and communication skills that it created, and the relationship between advanced schooling and economic viability.
The number of people involved in agriculture decreased dramatically and many farmers found themselves performing work, such as transportation, sales, and clerical support, which required extensive record keeping.
Jack May's son, Michael May, was born in 1981, a time when the majority of people in the same town where his great-grandmother grew up now had some type of post-secondary education and engaged in white collar work.
Because black churches were free from white domination, they were a space that provided various opportunities for African American youth to acquire literacy and leadership skills.
Brandt writes, "Members of African American churches also organized to provide housing, health care, capital investment, and insurance."
The fifth chapter of Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives discusses the differences in reading and writing teachings of religious institutions.
Reading, has always been a more clearly defined curricular activity, whereas definitions of writing in school have continued to shift, from the mechanical art of copying to grammar to exposition to creative expression and personal growth."
Additionally, reading has always had a more clearly defined role in American society compared to writing, and this has affected the degree of sponsorship each of these skills has received.
[6] Conversely, schools that are struggling to produce literate and high achieving individuals receive the least funding and thus, the cycle repeats with the pattern becoming more exacerbated each time.
This has raised many concerns as to whether children from low socioeconomic backgrounds should receive earlier and additional educational interventions to help them overcome the inherent obstacles they face in their journeys towards literacy acquisition.