Schooling That "Saves": The Emergence of Literacy as Secular Salvation in Colonial Kenya

• In Event: 25.013 - Traveling Discourses of "Democracy": Unsettling Stable Promises and Making Difference Transnationally Through Inclusion

Abstract

A rapidly growing for-profit school reform program in Sub-Saharan Africa today targets families living on $2 USD a day by offering “world-class pedagogy” (Bridge, 2016). Foundational to this claim is the acquisition of literacy disseminated through scripted lessons so as to provide “knowledge for all” (Bridge, 2016). To historicize the timeless quality of literacy for “all,” this paper examines the arrival of the World Literacy Movement—and the efforts of Dr. Robert Laubach as a worldwide “Literacy Evangelist” eighty years prior in Colonial Kenya. The question is how literacy education became unmoored from Kenya’s religious missions’ aim of salvation and became an objective in its own right—a primary gatekeeper to inclusion in colonial and post-colonial cultural theses of development and democracy.

The concern with literacy for “all” may seem banal—the function of the modern school has been, after all, to produce literate people. Yet tradition does not explain how literacy education has moved away from the comprehension of a religious text to resembling a biomedical intervention (Tröhler, 2015). Today's literacy education requires “direct instruction” of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Nor does tradition explain how the development and administration of literacy education is a burgeoning industry across the Global South that entails increasingly specialized forms of technical expertise that circulate among international donors, non-governmental organizations, governmental bodies, and educational research alike. Crucial questions about literacy education’s “place,” as a developmental thesis for liberal democracies today and in colonial schemes in the past, remain underexplored. What accounts for literacy education’s foundational quality in efforts to educate “all”? What notions of expertise make literacy education possible?

Methodologically, the paper employs an analytics of power in which notions of literacy education are studied through the rules and practices that comprise its “reason.” Literacy education is a grid of intelligibility that orders thought and action in schooling, making some ways of knowing possible and true, and other ways impossible and invalid. The instruments, techniques, and expertise of literacy education, then, can be studied for how they (dis)qualify children from participation, placing some children as already “outside” of schooling’s norms, and subjecting them to interventions that respond to their particular expressions of “illiteracy.”

Historicizing literacy education makes visible the limits of the strategy to provide “knowledge for all” (Bridge, 2016) as part of a democratizing gesture of development. While universal notions of development and democracy evoke a common human condition, these inclusive gestures simultaneously produce dysfunctional bodies and spaces—what Toni Morrison (1993) has called “silent presences”—that are oppositional to the unity presumed by the “all.” Whereas the divide between “saved” and “heathen” has been given much attention in studies of Christian theology, underexplored is how the couplet of literate/illiterate entails its own interventions in order to fulfill secular promises embedded in development and democracy. These values need to be explored for how they continue to differentiate and divide populations and produce the unlivable cultural spaces and problematic kinds of people that schooling seeks to transform.

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas