America’s Choice: Literacy or Productivity?

Abstract

With investment in human capital an urgent economic imperative in America’s quest for competitiveness, policymakers and analysts have focused on the bottom half of the labor force. In doing so their vision of literacy has been constricted by workplace needs. The literacy discourse is framed in terms of what workplaces, not adults, need. The curriculum follows efficiency criteria, not straying from the workplace context. I argue that this view of the problem fits Bhola’s motivational developmental/ structural-developmental explanation of how national governments view the problem of adult literacy. I argue further that this workplace-based approach to illiteracy leaves the root causes of the problem—such as inequality of opportunity in the society—substantially intact, and that what is needed is a grander conception in line with Dewey’s vocationalism and consistent with his democratic ideal.