Who is illiterate?

It is no surprise that while everyone is engaged in promoting literacy, there is little discussion on the history of forms of illiteracy!

If becoming literate is understood as learning to read and write, then is illiteracy not a particular instance of literacy, a particular condition or a state of being, of those who are literate? Considering those who belong to a non-literate oral tradition as illiterate is clearly an instance of illiteracy. The ‘universal’ of literacy is in question. Perhaps in seeking to understand the phenomena of illiteracy, we are on the path to becoming literate, in the same way as the quest to understand darkness is the seeking of enlightenment.

Today we are progressing towards a ‘civilization of illiteracy’, argues Mihai Nadin. ‘By civilization of illiteracy I mean one in which literate characteristics no longer constitute the underlying structure of effective practical experience. Furthermore, I mean one in which no one form of literacy dominates, as it did until the turn of the last century and still does. This civilization of illiteracy is one of many literacy’s, each with its own characteristics and rules of functioning.’¹

Nadin draws attention to an important aspect of illiteracy, namely that ‘literate characteristics no longer constitute the structure of effective practical experiences.’ The phenomenon of illiteracy is not constituted by an inability to read and write. It is rather ‘literacy’ that is the basis of illiteracy, since reading and writing (literate elements) are disconnected from the structure of practical experiences in life situations. There is no resemblance between the characteristics of a structure that constitutes ‘effective practical experience’ and ‘literate characteristics’ acquired by reading and writing the alphabet, the word, and the sentence. In other words, there is a separation of the lexical truth generated from the grammar of written languages and the truths of effective practical experience. The civilization of illiteracy has emerged from this separation.

To understand our practical experience we thus need many literacies – agricultural, emotional, computer, cultural, critical, ecological, health, financial, functional, information, media, mental health, numerical, racial, reading and writing, scientific, statistical, technological, and visual. The totality of many literacies that are absent constitute the civilization of illiteracy. In other words, the civilization of illiteracies refers to these ‘many’ illiteracies.² 

The totality of these illiteracies structures the effective practical experiences of the modern capitalist economy. What consequences do these multiple illiteracies have on the literate characteristics?

 

The universal of illiteracy is manifest in the expectation that literacy enables people to exercise their agency to determine for themselves a dignified life. How is this expectation to be realized when the literate elements no longer constitute the structures of effective practical experience? The underlying assumption of this expectation is that those who are illiterate, that is those who are not able to read and write, have no agency.

According to the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2006: ‘…out of the total 759 million illiterates adults India still has the highest number… about 72 million primary school age children and another 71 million adolescents are not at school, and on current trends, 56 million primary school age children will still be out of school in 2015 …in India the poorest 20 per cent were over three times more likely to be out of school than children from the richest 20 per cent… many of the 8.3 million Indian children born with low birth weight will carry a burden of disadvantage with them into primary school…’

‘…Vocational programmes in India reach only about three per cent of rural youth and there are few signs that these are benefiting people in getting jobs… the image of technical and vocational provision as a form of second-class education… providing limited benefits for employment remains largely intact… India’s efforts to strengthen vocational education and responsibilities are spread among several ministries and authorities leading to a great deal of duplication and fragmentation of the work… In the three years to 2007, out of school population fell by eight million.’

‘…two-thirds of the total illiterate people are women… in rural India, just 28 per cent of grade three students could subtract two-digit numbers and only a third could tell the time… in India the caste systems obstruct education... children from low-caste households score at far lower levels when their caste is publicly announced than when it is unannounced.’³ 

 

To get to the underlying structures of the practical effective experience of illiteracy described above, it is important to know, among other things, the underlying social formations. The 2006 report has no discussion of this.

Underlying this phenomenal illiteracy are the structures of the neo-liberal economy determined by literate elements. In brief, the literate elements that determine the accumulation of capital of the neo-liberal economy are the alphabets. As symbolic capital, the alphabets are a means to acquire capital – and the alphabet is capital itself. As symbolic capital, the alphabet determines the rapid specialization of knowledge. As a means of communication, the alphabet determines rapid innovation of digital technologies. As a form of capital, the alphabet determines the linguistic market.

Every specialized sector holds a monopoly on its technical vocabulary, knowledge and technology. This specialized knowledge, necessary to live a life of dignity, is becoming more complex, vast and unwieldy. And now all this knowledge is digitized and seen as necessary for the efficient working of the economy.

Marazzini⁴ points out that, ‘The linguistic nature of post-Fordist labour and the virtualization of techno-productive processes (digitalization of production, acceleration of information flows and the superimposition of product and service dimensions of goods) comport a radical change in the framework of production of wealth on world-wide scale.’

 

From Konrad Ehlich’s work, we learn that an important aspect of this is linguistic markets: ‘The opposite of economy are the faux frais, those false costs whose legitimation is based on non-economic grounds that can overshadow or even ruin the realization of profit. The economically unnecessary has to succumb to the spell of economy. To ferret such costs out and minimize or even eliminate them calls for enormous effort. In the accounting of unnecessary ancillary costs, plurilingualism is one of the items, and perhaps even a significant one. Quite naturally, the rationalization of communication then becomes a subsidiary goal of economic management. A uniform world language of trade, circulation, and production emerges as a goal whose achievement seems to be adequately guaranteed by the usual means employed to accomplish economic rationality. As for communication, faith in the "self-regulation of the market" has the following consequence: Only those who submit to the forces of linguistic-economic rationality will be able to assert themselves in the competition. An economized history will ignore all the rest.’

‘The choice of the language... is subjected to the blindness of the linguistic market. A quite simple equation favours that language whose speakers already represent the major power in the marketplace. Other possible arguments recede (for example, those based on the number of speakers) or are rejected as self-discrediting. Economy also provides an economic metaphor for the communicative "leftovers" of this process, i.e. for the other languages and their undeniable survival: they are luxury.’⁵ 

 

The competition for resources to accelerate economic growth has escalated the propensity towards armed conflict. It has taken away natural resources from the people, driving millions into extreme poverty and seducing millions to consumerism, thereby strengthening the hold of hierarchal social structures. Governments are compelled to invest in information technologies and infrastructure to upgrade the industrial-military complex to accelerate economic growth. Under these circumstances, the loss of schools, because of armed conflict or the threat of armed conflict, is unlikely to decrease and the out of school population is likely to increase.

Under these circumstances, disparities only increase. Its manifestation in the education system is reflected in a dual education system – one for the rich and another for the poor, both in India and perhaps elsewhere in the world where these forces operate. In both, the social status of students and teachers (for instance their caste and religion and colour) undermines capacities to teach and learn. The schools for the rich prepare the elite to run the state, industry, military, business. In contrast, schools for the poor emphasize functional literacy and prepare the large mass of people to engage in petty production and be part of the unorganized sector. In these schools, the infrastructure is poor, there are no textbooks, and only a few teachers, most of whom are absent most of the time.

The spending on literacy is unable to keep pace with the acceleration of three significant interrelated aspects of the economy – rapid specialization of knowledge, rapid technological obsolescence, and the digital divide. Specialized knowledge is out of reach for the ‘public’; it is not part of the common pool of knowledge. It can be acquired on payment and privately owned. In the ‘long term’ everyone is illiterate in fields that are not part of their immediate concern and specialization in the modern, neo-liberal capitalist industrial world. Within an area of specialization, rapid technological innovation goes hand in hand with technological obsolescence, human resource obsolescence and obsolescence of knowledge. Under these conditions, many kinds of ‘illiteracies’ proliferate.

 

The Education for All Global Monitoring Report (EFAGMR) 2006 discusses four discrete aspects of literacy – literacy as an autonomous set of skills; literacy as applied, practiced and situated; literacy as a learning process; and literacy as text.⁶ Historically, these four aspects of literacy have their origins in ‘universal education’ which was intended to break the monopoly of the priestly class over the ‘word of God’ and make the ‘word of reason’ accessible to all. Reason was seen as a universal element present in all ‘particular things’ of the world, since it was believed that ‘there is nothing without reason.’

Under Project Enlightenment, universal education was structured to take this universal element to people across the world. From here emerged the necessity for the ‘alphabetization’ of reason. In the course of ‘alphabetization’ of reason, the alphabet and the written word became a universal. The alphabetization of thinking and of the mind became undifferentiated from the word of reason and reason was seen as coeval with reading and writing. Over time, it froze thought in alphabets, words, sentences, and paragraphs. Frozen thought froze thinking, which then moves in circles around the phonetic resonances of the alphabets of the word of reason.

 

The structure of the universal education system – primary, secondary, high schools to university – as we know it today, evolved alongside the capitalist industrial regime to universalize the ‘written word of reason.’ A ‘universal’ of this education system is that, while accessible to everyone in principle, in practice, accessibility is conditional to the availability of capital. On the one hand, those who have money can be part of this system and on the other there is not enough money to bring it within the reach of ‘those who are not rich’. Entrepreneurship under this regime is the desire and will to master the alphabetic word and hold monopoly over it (taking possession of it and censoring unwanted meanings).

This ascendance of a particular universal has subverted the original intention of universal education to break the monopoly of the word. The monopoly of the priestly class has been replaced with the monopoly of capital. The ‘word’ continues to be inaccessible to people at large and has contributed to the making of ‘critical illiteracy’. The monopoly of the word underlies critical illiteracy. This is manifest in the detheorized teacher, in technological modernization as a solution to problems, in the propagation of multiple literacies, and in the mainstreaming of vernacular primary producers.

 

Dave Hill and Simon Boxely⁷ argue that the neo-liberal regimes have constructed a ‘detheorized teacher’ who is the foundation of ‘education for all’ classrooms. For instance, in England and Wales, teacher education trains teachers with skills in technicist curriculums, taking away in the process the imagination to ask critical questions. Wrigley underlines that the neo-liberal schooling in UK constructed by the Thatcherite and Blairte education reforms enriches this anti-theory propensity. For instance, ‘low standards in education were blamed on the teachers and schools and to justify introduction of draconian structures of surveillance for technological modernization and ideological retrenchment. These standards were about education not producing the quality of skills the economy needs for everyone to become highly skilled problem solvers.’

This phenomena of the detheorized teacher is part of a legacy of the industrial revolution – workers were given time to read but not to write for fear that ‘workers might frame and disseminate their ideas and experiences’.⁸ On the one hand, rational-technical solutions to problems of underachievement were separated from ideological and philosophical origins and, on the other, as Gustavo Fischman points out, these regimes of ‘perfect competition’ have intensified disparities and inequalities between and within nations, have failed to secure minimum standards of fairness and justice, and have created conditions across the world to make people feel that they have lost control over economic, political and social factors that affect their lives.⁹ 

This education system holds a monopoly over the ‘written word of reason.’ This is the basis of intellectual property rights, specialization, division of labour and perfect competition. In such a world, the literate rich pay for the services and hand over their agency to the expert. The ‘illiterate’ poor have no resources. Literacy for the poor is an expensive proposition. It costs money, which is hard to earn and difficult to sustain. They have little access to the expert and thus become dependent on service provider civil society organizations. They are deprived of their agency.

 

This word and its alphabetization was transplanted in non-European countries across the world by industrial colonial regimes. In India, even as this universal system undermined the monopoly of the twice-born castes, at the same time, these castes were privileged by the ‘universal system’ and the other vernacular primary producers – the forest dwellers, the fish workers, the crafts persons – were left out, marginalized.

Such a system cannot be inclusive of ‘voices’ of the diverse vernacular social and cultural people who have been marginalized. In light of the history of marginalization of peoples across the world, inclusion needs to be problematized. In a linguistic market, in how many languages can teaching be conducted? How can different styles and rhythms of learning be given time and space in classroom teaching? Is not ‘inclusion’, as we know it today, a political tool that maintains the ‘difference of repression’,¹⁰ that is the ‘difference that is repressive’ between marginalized people (those who are to be/want to be included) and the mainstream people (those with whom they will be included)? History has shown that this tool is made available to the ‘marginalized people’ to ‘become what they are not.’ For instance, the forest dwellers are expected to become Hindus and Christians.

 

Universal ‘education for all’ means ‘mainstreaming’ and becoming part of the post-colonial capitalist industrial regime that finances this education system and contributes labour to the reproduction of the political economy of illiteracy. This regime is an alliance between the state and the market, shaping ‘education as a service’ and not ‘studentship’. Students lose their agency in the course of being trained as human resources personnel to run the information systems for production and reproduction of goods and services. The fee for this system is in proportion to heavy capital investments. This capital is generated from industrial-military enterprises that are destructive of ecological systems.

What then is the alphabet of critical literacy? It is worth considering what Illich and Sanders¹¹ have to say this regard: ‘History becomes possible when the Word turns into words… Where no words are left behind, the historian finds no foundations for his reconstructions… We have often felt frustrated, but we accept that prehistory cannot be read. No bridge can be constructed to span this chasm’ (p. 3). ‘History remains a strict discipline only when it stops, in its description, of the nonverbal past…’ (p. 3).

 

Both literary and moral feigning depends on the author’s ability to reshape (in Latin fingere, whence ‘fiction’) his own thoughts of untruth, which in the late middle ages was called narration. ‘Only when I have gotten to thinking as silent tracing of words on the parchment of my memory, can I detach thought from speech and contradict it. A full-blown lie presupposes a self that thinks before it says what is thought… Neither such a thought as distinct from speech, nor such a thinking as distinct from the speaker can exist without speech having been transmogrified and frozen into thought that is stored in the literary memory’ (p. 84).

‘Just as much as the word, silence is a creature of the alphabet: pause between words and words, the silent contemplation of the text, the silence of meditative thought, are all forms of alphabetical silence; even in our silence we are lettered men, at home on the island of history in the alphabetical domain’ (p. 119).

Across the world, critiques of the neo-liberal economy and a simultaneous exploration of a thousand possibilities have created a diversity of social forums for studentship, which endeavour to bring to the centre-stage of the learning process the epistemological agency and dismantle the genealogies of its repression. This is now emerging as a corrective for a ‘detheorized teacher’.

Some of these forums are described below. Gibson, Queen, Ross and Vinson¹² underline that ‘critical pedagogy advocates have sometimes failed to acknowledge the elitist roots of their theory as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind, as in Paulo Friere’s heavy borrowing from Hegel in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It fails the test of material equality and class consciousness. How can this shortcoming be overcome?

John E. Lavin¹³ introduces the notion of guerrilla pedagogy. He points out that this notion has its genesis in the historical concept that guerrillas are by definition the weaker side and that their first duty is to survive. ‘Guerrilla pedagogy is an ethic which is not rooted in violence but is based in a concern for human treatment… it is a form of love that became the seed bed of each individual revolutionary… Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed traced Guevara’s guerrilla spirit in a dialogue with peasants…all this is summed up in recognizing "radical listening" as an act of guerrilla pedagogy.’ John Lavin suggests radical listening is ‘listening to the voices, the breath of the people… It shows how to confront suffering that we all must share in our community.’

 

Gandin’s¹⁴ concept of articulation deepens our understanding of radical listening. He points out that when a global hegemonic discourse occurs at a local level, not only does it have to reconfigure and rearticulate to make sense in the particular context, it also accounts for opposition and resistance of local people. This, he argues, creates the possibilities for constructing alternative practices. Gandin points out that ‘education policy implemented in Brazil was not a monolithic implementation of conservative policies originally conceived in the core countries, but re-articulations and hybridism formed in the struggles between global and local hegemonies and between hegemonic and counter hegemonic forces.’

 

For instance, the citizen’s schools project in Porto Alegre (Brazil)¹⁵ had a radical new logic. It used spaces and gaps created by neo-liberal policies and creeds. The ability to recognize these spaces and gaps came from the understanding that a ‘connection between groups and specific ideologies is not necessary or given; it cannot be easily deduced from a central dominant ideology. These spaces and gaps emerge as one is able to see that the articulation between groups and ideology is non-necessary and more or less contingent connections are made possible in a specific context and at a specific historical moment.’

The citizen’s school sought to create citizens and not mere consumers. For instance, citizen schools would not punish students for allegedly being slow in their process of learning. In this new configuration, the traditional deadline – the end of each academic year, when the student had to prove that what they had learnt was eliminated in favour of a different time organization – was a conscious attempt to eliminate mechanisms in schools that perpetuate exclusion, failure and dropouts as well blaming of the victim that accompanies these.’

What we learn here is that listening to students’ voices is of the same significance as listening to peasants. The concept of articulation brings in student’s voices to become a significant element of guerrilla pedagogy.

Verger and Xavier¹⁶ draw attention to the emergence of, in the course of resistance, a ‘highly extensive epistemic community’ inclusive of a variety of actors who participate in resistance. This includes civil society activists, public universities, local governments, and different UN bodies. Given this diversity of actors, there have also emerged action repertories – direct action, political and legal pressure, public information and monitoring, creation of global legal frameworks. The impact of resistance, they point out, is now at three epistemic levels namely, the substantive, the procedural, and the symbolic.

 

Oliveira’s¹⁷ discussion of Latin America takes us deeper in understanding the theoretical grounding of such resistance. In Latin America, resistance ‘combined a defence of universal access to education with a priority to improve the working conditions of teachers. This was grounded in the defence of workers right in general as well as in the understanding that teachers’ conflicts present certain particularities and cannot be analyzed within the wide spectrum of capital-work relations if we do not take into account the relative autonomy of teaching as profession, the specificity of pedagogical work and the final goals of education.’ Oliveira further suggests that we critically look at the history of unions. ‘Unions have legitimized capitalist development based upon exploitation of the labour force, while paradoxically providing a much needed platform for democratic struggle and resistance to many forms of exploitation. The general crisis of the unions takes on a particular significance in the case of teachers.’

 

The demand for fair wages is to be met through the capitalist system and this results in the state determining the form and content of universal education. How then can universal education be grounded in radical listening?

Mike Cole¹⁸ helps us to understand this with Louis Althusser’s distinction between a repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatuses. The former includes government, administration, army, police, courts while the latter includes religion, education, family, law, trade unions, communications and culture. Both operate through force and in the interest of the ruling class. In other words, education needs to serve the interest of capital and the ruling class. In the UK, Cole says great strides with respect to legislation have been made over the last decade in promoting equality of opportunity and equality of gender, race, disability and sexuality. Some improvements have also been made in the curriculum itself.

This raises the difficult question – what is the form, content and orientation of scripts designed by resistance? These are wordless.

Peter MacLaren and Juha Suoranta¹⁹ suggest that the labour power that is generated in the course of resistance scripts designs for socialist education for negotiating individual as well as collective being. According to them, ‘Labour power that is the capacity or the potential to labour, does not have to serve its current masters – capital. It serves the master only when it engages in the act of labouring for a wage. Because individuals can refuse to labour in the interest of capital accumulation, labour power can therefore serve another cause – the cause of socialism. Socialist education can be used as a means of finding ways of transcending the contradictory aspects of labour power creation and creating different spaces where a de-reification, de-commodification and de-colonization of subjectivity can occur.’

 

Classrooms for such socialist education, they argue, ‘mirror in organization what students and teachers would collectively like to see in the world outside of schools… Further, socialist education is directed at unmasking power. This is accomplished by encouraging people to read the word as well the world critically and act on the power that they already possess. It is concerned with learning about liberation, reclaiming reason and practicing democracy. People do not live by bread alone. Forms of art become forms of life, both in the curriculum of socialist pedagogy and the quotidian existence of population.’

To this, one may add, people do not think only with words!

Grounded in radical listening, studentship is an engagement with de-signing and designing. On the one hand, it de-signs (dissolves the signature of) the author of the alphabetized word, and on the other, it designs the contours of epistemologies in these forums. The work of de-signing and designing involves ‘listening and scripting’, respectively. Radical listening de-signs the phono-centric and de-scripts the logo-centric aspects of the alphabetical word.²⁰ It de-freezes the word and releases thinking (logos) from the bondage of the alphabet. This opens up the possibility for designing work and non-alphabetical scripts that have use value (and do not participate in the creation of exchange value) and do not serve the interest of the masters-capital.

‘Radical listening generates labour power necessary to de-alphabetize learning. It shows that knowledge is collectively created by sharing and doing; it makes accessible social structures and the way of life of primary producers – the forest dwellers, the fish workers, the craftspersons – and shows that these are grounded in studentship. It creates conditions for studentship and for designing with wordless scripts, "forms of art to become forms of life".’

 

Radical listening shows that the state and the market cannot be given a free hand to determine the form and content of education, in particular and the modes of production and reproduction of knowledge, in general. It shows that irrespective of the class character of the state, the budget allocation is unlikely to be in favour of inclusive production and reproduction of knowledge, for the ‘state cannot relinquish its monopoly over means of violence.’

Radical listening builds the capacity to explore ways of involving young people in a critical and engaged study of the world and recognize the significance of students’ voice. Only then can curriculum be connected with pupils’ lives and experiences, and open up new opportunities and horizons. Together, critical pedagogy and radical listening differentiate between the spaces defined by the state and market alliance and the creative spaces in society where experiments explore possible alternatives. These creative spaces help to build resistance and resilience. Among other things, these experiments demonstrate that to learn a student must be an active subject engaged in inquiry and not a passive recipient of knowledge. This determines a basic condition for making education accessible to all, namely that the student has a role in determining the kind of education he receives.

 

A classroom is wherever learning is possible. This notion of a classroom can accommodate all students and there can be as many curriculums as there are students – inclusive of voices of the diverse social and cultural people, especially those who have been marginalized. Such curriculums, in many languages and in different styles and rhythms of learning, can be given time and space in classroom teaching. Every student learns in different ways with languages, rhythms and epistemologies. It is the recognition of this epistemological diversity that is inclusive of all learners.

The beginning of inclusive education is learning to listen to the diversity of voices, perspectives, and epistemologies that say ‘there are thousand alternatives.’ This is crucial if we are to recover the critical and radical role of education. These vernacular classrooms are outside the four walls of classrooms in schools, colleges and universities. What is learnable from the vernacular classrooms is that ‘studentship’ is more important than ‘inclusive classrooms’.

To overcome marginalization it is not necessary to become part of the neo-liberal mainstream; instead to become part of the vernacular frontier that begins where the Word returns frustrated. At this frontier begins a studentship that works towards the ‘de-alphabetization’ of the popular mind as well as of epistemologies.

 

Footnotes:

1. Mihail Nadin, The Civilization of Illiteracy. Dresden University Press, 1997, p. 9. See http://books.google.co.in/books?id= QzfUFIDkKGUC&printsec=frontcover# v=o nepage&q&f=false

2. http://listverse.com/2012/04/04/20-types-of-illiteracy/

3. http://www.deccanherald.com/content/47788/india-still-home-largest-illiterate.html

4. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2008, p. 89.

5. Konrad Ehlich, ‘Thrifty Monolingualism and Luxuriating Plurilingualism?’ in Florian Coulmas (ed.), Language Regimes in Transformation: Future Prospects for German and Japanese in Science, Economy and Politics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2007, p. 26, 27.

6. Education for All: Global Monitoring Report. UNESCO. Paris, 2006, p. 148.

7. Dave Hill and Simon Boxely, ‘Critical Education for Economic, Environmental and Social Justice’, in Dave Hill (ed.), Contesting Neo-liberal Education: Public Resistance and Collective Advances. Routledge, New York, 2009.

8. Terry Wrigley, ‘Rethinking Education in the Era of Globalizatio’, in Dave Hill (ed.), ibid.

9. Gustvo Fischman, ‘Introduction’, in Dave Hill (ed.), ibid.

10. Derrida has given us a hypothesis of a crime that is different from political crimes, ‘those assassinations with political motivation which litter History with so many corpses.’ He suggests ‘thinking of that crime in which allowing for the difference of repression, the political being of politics, the concept of politics in its most powerful tradition is constituted.’ See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship. Verso, London, (1994) 2005, p. ix.

11. Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. A B C: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. Marion Boyars, London, 1988.

12. Rich Gibson, Greg Queen, E. Wayne Ross and Kevin Vinson, ‘The Rogue Forum’, in Dave Hill (ed.), op cit.

13. John E. Levin, ‘Solidarity Building Dominican: Haitian Cross Cultural Education’, in Dave Hill (ed.), op cit.

14. Luis Armando Gandin, ‘Learning from the South: The Creation of Real Alternatives to Neo-liberal Policies in Education in Porto Alegre, Brazil’, in Dave Hill (ed.), op cit.

15. Ibid.

16. Antonio Verger and Xavier Bonal, ‘Resistance to the Gats’, in Dave Hill (ed.), op cit.

17. Dalila Andrade Oliveira, ‘Teacher Conflicts and Resistance in Latin America’ in Dave Hill (ed.), op cit.

18. Mike Cole, ‘The Apparatuses of the Working Class: Experiences from the United Kingdom: Educational Lessons from Venezuela’, in Dave Hill (ed.), op cit.

19. Peter MacLaren and Juha Suoranta, ‘Socialist Pedagogy’, in Dave Hill (ed.), op cit.

20. For a discussion on phonocentrism and logocentrism see Jacques Derrida, ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’, in Of Grammatology. (Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, ch. 1, 1974, pp. 6-26.