Drafting U.S. Literacy

The author explores how World War II changed the rationale for mass literacy in the United States from a nineteenth-century moral imperative into a twentieth-century production imperative. She suggests that we are in a similar period of reevaluation today, and that, if the capacity to fuse older and newer ideologies is at its limit, the school may find itself running behind or even against the dominant cultural imperatives for literacy in a new world order.