Brandt Precise

Luke Granger

Dr. B

Eng. 329

February 14, 2009

Precise #2 Brandt: Sponsors of Literacy

 

            Brandt’s essay demonstrates how literacy needs a sponsor in order to flourish in the world. Without a sponsor literacy can’t exist because there is no meaning to literacy and no arena to welcome it. There needs to be a reason for literacy, whether it be church, government, businesses, or family correspondences, literacy needs an excuse to be, in order to be. All these institutions support literacy by using it to get its ideologies and influences out to the people. These sponsors are unequally distributed throughout the population therefore giving more power to certain socio-economic classes.

            Brandt starts his essay off by giving a brief history of pre-war print shop life and the literacy that flourished. Prior to the invention of the printing press the print shops were incubators for literacy and political debate. When the steam press began to gain a stronghold in the market, the editors who used to run the shops were being replaced by mechanics and the print shop culture dwindled. However, the public benefited as print became cheaper and more readily available. This was an economic sponsor that affected literacy in two different ways, one being beneficial to the masses, the other being detrimental to a small community of editors.

            Brandt discusses sponsorship of literacy through magazines, advertisement and market. We see it at a young age as businesses sponsor baseball teams and have their names on their jerseys. They are unknowingly pushing literacy on society, teaching young ones to read. We see the availability of literacy, churches teaching poor and lower economic status African Americans in slavery to be capable of upward mobility in the socio-economic realm as a result of the ability to read. The sponsors of literacy explain the ideological pressures that are created at the site of literacy learning.

            Brandt discusses the unequal opportunities to literacy sponsors in the lower income society. He contributes this to the education and income of the parents and to the norms and values of the different ethnic groups. Meanwhile, higher income individuals have more available access to literacy sponsors. He gives several examples of these throughout his essay.  We see that sponsors help to organize and administer stratified systems of opportunity and access. Literacy sponsors create new literacy requirements while discrediting the older ones. 

            What Brandt is trying to prove in his essay is that without sponsors, literacy wouldn’t exist. There would be no real reason for it. Through religion, church needs it to guide them. Businesses need literate people to read about their product and sell their product to. Humans need literacy in order to communicate more efficiently and survive in the world today. Schools can’t survive without kids to teach to, another literacy sponsor. Recognizing the affects of literacy throughout the world and the absolute critical need is crucial to understanding the necessity of it.