by Timothy Shanahan
There’s a commotion in the back of the classroom: a heated altercation between two boys, one with tears streaming down his cheeks. It turns out that he, the one who is crying, was looking at a book, and the other boy rudely grabbed it away.
“James, we don’t take things away from others,” the teacher admonishes.
But the situation is more complicated than it first appears. James is now tearing up, too. It turns out that the book he grabbed actually belonged to him. James had left the book on his desk, and Andre, the boy who was crying first, had taken it without permission. James, in other words, was just taking back what was rightfully his.
Now the teacher, recognizing the demands of justice, tries to gracefully revise her original approach. “Andre, you shouldn’t carry things away that don’t belong to you. If that book was on James’s desk you should ask James for permission to look at it. Tell James you’re sorry.”
Impromptu ethics lessons take place in classrooms every day. Ethics are the rules of right living, the regulations by which we govern our social lives. When speaking of school kids, we usually don’t use words like ethics, but instead talk about courtesy, discipline, or right-and-wrong. But ethics have as much place in a classroom as they should have had in the Reading First offices in Washington. (See this article on the latest Inspector General’s report for more details regarding the ongoing controversy concerning the Reading First program.)
This column, my last as president, is about the literacy curriculum. What do we need to teach to make someone truly literate? A sound list of essential topics would surely include phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing, and...ethics? One of the brilliant theoretical developments in literacy research in the past 50 years has been the recognition of literacy as a social act of communication.
It’s easy to miss the idea that there could be an ethics of literacy, because we read books and magazines and those are just objects. But people’s words are not objects as much as they are representations of people’s thinking. This is, ultimately, why book burning is so terrifying. Reading–writing relationships are, at least in part, reader–writer relationships. Readers have to think about authors, and authors have to think about readers, and in this social milieu issues of ethics arise.
When the Enron scandal emerged, the newspapers were full of stories about the need to teach ethics in the boardrooms and business schools to discourage highly-paid CEOs and CFOs from taking other people’s stuff (sort of like James and Andre, but with expense accounts and Ralph Lauren suits).
I see a lot of bad reading and writing going on these days, but I haven’t come across any articles in The New York Times calling for greater attention to the ethics of reading. Nevertheless, I think it’s time we made reading ethics a more explicit part of the curriculum.
One way to think of ethics is as a set of social responsibilities, and sociologists and legal scholars agree on the need to balance individual freedoms and social responsibilities. “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins” is one famous formulation of this proposition. Because readers have rights, there is a need for ethics in order to protect others from the unbridled expression of those rights.
French novelist Daniel Pennac has written delightfully about readers’ rights (a new translation of his The Rights of Readers recently appeared). Pennac is concerned about reluctant readers, and he attributes the lowered amounts of reading to the tendency of teachers to “torture” kids with books.
Pennac wants kids to read—and to read good stuff—but he believes this would more likely result if there were real choices for kids. “For if we want my son/my daughter/young people to read, we must grant them the rights we grant ourselves.” Pennac’s agenda is one of liberation.
He proposes 10 readers’ rights, and I think it’s fair to say that most of these simply grant readers the room to work, to do their own thinking, to read what they choose. Of course, the right to choose to read, paradoxically enough, carries with it the right not to. According to Pennac, reading should be an inalienable right, not a duty or an imposition.
The right not to read carries with it the right to skip the dull parts and the right not to finish every text that we start (though I hope you’re still with me).
Some of Pennac’s other rights include the right to read aloud (this I admit, fluency teacher that I am, is one of my favorites), the right to read anything, the right to read it again, and the right to be quiet (you don’t have to tell everybody how you feel about what you have read, thank you very much).
But rights and responsibilities, as I said, go hand in hand. As a human being, I should have the freedom to exercise the inalienable rights of a reader, but as a member of a community, I have to exercise those rights within my social duties to the rest of humanity.
E.D. Hirsch is a well-known figure because of his writings on cultural literacy. However, long before he did that work, he wrote a wonderful book called the Validity of Interpretation, which is a provocative starting point for considering an ethics of reading.
Reader-response theories have been promoted in academia for the past several decades; think of Louise Rosenblatt and Stanley Fish, for instance. Their formulations make a reader’s interpretation the central point of reading—a championing of the rights of readers and a kind of benign neglect for authors and their meanings.
Hirsch, on the other hand, starts from the premise that we owe it to our partners in communication to discern what they actually meant and how they meant it. Words are an expression of a person’s intentions, and we have a responsibility to be respectful of other persons, so we must truly try to understand their meaning—rather than just imposing our own.
This is a hard one for readers. The power of prior knowledge—what we already know and believe when we begin to read something—can overwhelm an author’s message. We spend much time these days directing kids to use their prior knowledge in reading comprehension lessons, but we should devote at least as much effort to showing them how to read against what they already think they know.
The ethics of reading become particularly important for critical reading. As soon as I can determine that what you have written is absurd, profound, or beautiful, there is an even greater responsibility for me to get it right. That means interpreting text within the context of an entire message, considering the historical moment in which it was written, and even bearing in mind other writings of the author.
Hirsch argues against putting words into other people’s mouths. While there is plenty of evidence that says that we can never figure out precisely what an author meant, according to Hirsch, we still have an obligation to try to figure it out.
Political campaigns are notorious for reader-centered interpretation—expediency over ethics. Politicians know that their opponents are fine, upstanding citizens, but they often find ways to misread their opponents’ words as evidence of treachery, racism, or insensitivity. Good readers try to look at all the evidence, and they bend over backwards not to overinterpret an unfortunate word choice.
Within our teaching of reading, we need to find ways of helping children both to exercise their reading rights and to meet their reading responsibilities. The right to dip into texts as we choose, focusing only on what interests us, carries with it an obligation to read even more carefully so that we don’t misinterpret the text or the author; partial readings can be particularly treacherous.
Before we can teach such things thoroughly we would need to work out a formal code of literacy ethics, figuring out when it’s OK to require reading—when can’t you say no—or the circumstances in which a reader’s meaning should take precedence over the author’s. We could wait for that to be developed, but as with James and Andre most ethics are taught on the fly. Teachers just need to start to see daily literacy events in terms of the tensions between the reader’s individual liberties and our collective need for social accountability.
Given that this is my last column, let me be socially accountable here in thanking you for reading these columns and for the wonderful work that you do in advancing literacy and literacy education. I extend my gratitude to all IRA members and staff who have made this year a joy. The next column in this space will be by my dear friend and your next President, Linda Gambrell. I hope you will give her (and her columns) a generous and ethical reading!
IRA President Timothy Shanahan is a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and director of the UIC Center for Literacy.
Lessons in the ethics of literacy. (April 2007). Reading Today, 24(5), 18.
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