Abstract

While literacy is often thought to have some fundamentally liberating effect, the history of literacy education reveals that it is more often associated with didactic moral and religious instruction and with the maintenance of social control. In contemporary contexts, literacy education is more likely to be disassociated from any explicit moral project and connected only with the needs of the economy, in which case it serves an instrumental role in objectives that may have little to do with reading and writing. ;This project offers an account of the social and moral purposes of literacy in the context of modern, democratic, multicultural societies. In connecting reading and writing to general aspects communication, I draw on Jurgen Habermas's formal, pragmatic analysis of language. Habermas argues that an ideal of uncoerced communication directed at mutual understanding is implied in the linguistic and social practices of secular and non-authoritarian societies. In particular, this ideal explains communication's central role in mediating the forces of individual development and social solidarity. I use the notion of "dialogue" to describe the concrete forms of communication that embody the moral ideal of a free, mutual relation, and I argue that dialogue can describe communication through texts as well as among persons. My use of dialogue builds upon Paulo Freire's account literacy education, but it moves away from his exclusive focus on political critique and action. I go on to argue that the moral ideal of dialogue should guide the processes of reading, writing and discussion in literacy education, and I develop several implications of this "dialogical literacy," from the level of policy to curricular reform. ;I also argue that literacy, oriented by a dialogic ideal, plays a crucial role in providing a basis for public discourse in multicultural contexts, by cultivating the moral dispositions necessary for communication with those different from one's self. Building on the work of the sociolinguist James Gee, I also suggest that literacy education can help address the structural forms of inequity that are embedded in communicative practices among social and cultural groups