Language & Literacy: From Domination to Decolonization and Beyond

SEMILLAS SOCIEDAD CIVIL

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Language & Literacy: From Domination to Decolonization and Beyond

A response to "How do History and Religion Affect the Reading Habits and Practices of Latino Students"

By Tlayecantzi Marcos Aguilar, July 18, 2017

The tenets of critical pedagogy establish a clear imperative to recognize the transformative or oppressive nature of education and schooling in modern society. Towards this end, I found, "How do History and Religion Affect the Reading Habits and Practices of Latino Students" intriguing, useful and timely to the analysis of baseline assessment data generated by students in schools across the state of California this year. Understanding how and when education and schooling become either liberatory or oppressive calls for the study of the social-political foundations, functions and fidelities of schooling. In the case of Mexican indigenous children and youth across the state of California, the question of the relation between literacy and the assessment of literacy becomes even more complicated when one considers the historic and actual negative impact of colonization on language, culture and family preservation. While as Moguel and others assert, parental attitudes may go far to explain exceptional examples of families who overcome historic and economic educational disadvantage, we must still confront the relation of children and families to the state through schooling as an apparatus of domination and deculturalization and not simply as a pathway to social ascent. History and religion as perpetuated through the mechanisms of colonization by settler states affect the reading habits of Mexican students primarily as the driving forces of indigenous maternal language loss, perpetual deculturalization of children, and the perpetual colonization/alienation of indigenous children. While Moguel's analysis is limited to the assessment of English language literacy, arguably, this is also a measure of the child's right to assimilate. If history and religion are truly to be taken into account in search of better schooling outcomes for Mexican children, then, decolonizing pedagogy, curriculum, and educational autonomy must factor into a coherent analysis.

Assessment at Anahuacalmecac is defined as the process of collecting, analyzing and reporting data. It is the gathering and analysis of information about student performance and program effectiveness. Assessment is integral and crucial to the curriculum and to all teaching and learning. At Anahuacalmecac, the state-driven assessed curriculum is only one element of our educational design. Across the country, assessment has become a matter of national contention over the past few decades. After two terms of stalemate, the Obama administration finally on December 10, 2015, managed to get the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) signed into law reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act  replacing the fiasco left in place by the Bush administration. NCLB imposed over a decade of high-stakes standard-driven testing which fueled a resurgent ideological English-only movement disguised as a concern for educational quality in various states and stripped communities and families across the country of their right to maternal language and culture in public schooling. NCLB was not only ideological, it was incentivized by the $1.3 trillion “education market” in the U.S. New standards begot new curriculum, new curriculum begot new textbooks, new textbooks begot new platforms and media, new platforms begot new trainers and consultants, and new consultants of course begot new millions. In Los Angeles, a $1.3 billion sweetheart deal still under scrutiny by many and recently investigated by the FBI between Apple and the LAUSD got a randy superintendent in hot water, but the fight for a $100 billion education technology market is well underway.  Somewhere within this ideologically seeded and profit-driven reality of education in the US, the protagonists of the newly minted ESSA and its stepbrother, the CCSS, seek to proclaim a fight for education as a civil right. While the U.S. Department of Education’s initiative known as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) may seek to better pursue the ends for which public schools exist, most often, the assessed curriculum is very different from the written, taught and learned curriculum.    

How curriculum is taught ought to consider how curriculum is learned. Moguel's comparison of Protestant and Catholic literacy traditions in particular deserves attention. My own father spoke to me of his own challenges with the Catholic church in our farmworker border community which alienated children entrusted to it through violence, sexual abuse, over-reliance upon English and Latin and the central role of the priest. My response, however, is a petition for further critical study of the question of literacy heritage as one of colonization and not simply of "religion". In my own case, despite his reservations, my father succumbed to family pressure to educate me within the Catholic school tradition. This abruptly ended one Easter Sunday morning, when at the age of nine, my father prohibited me from ever stepping foot on the Catholic church grounds of our small border town. While incomprehensible to me at the time, much later I learned that age-old accusations of sexual predatory behavior against the priest had resurfaced, and my father sought to spare me of becoming victimized by this particular predator and consciously intended to divorce our family of the hypocrisy of organized religion - not just the Catholic church. As a foundation and function of colonization, religion has done more to affect the reading habits and practices of Mexicans than just alienate the reader from the text, since the initial invasion, war and predatory violence have directly impacted children and families in unfathomably cruel ways. If how children learn is considered, schools and educators may yet become more effective at teaching.

Conquest is an inherent quality and pre-condition of public school education. Moguel asserts that,

"We know that Catholic Spain and Portugal went on to conquer what are now Mexico, Central America and South America. My fear is that the reading habits and practices of Latino students in the United States is influenced by the cultural legacy of a Latin American Catholicism that did not emphasize the reading and interpretation of text on the part of the natives it aimed to convert, leaving those literacy practices largely to the clergy and a few hand-picked natives."

Here, Moguel’s analysis could have also considered the impacts, processes, and legacy of what Joel Spring terms "deculturalization", a condition of colonization by a settler state apparatus. In "Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States", Spring defines 'deculturalization' as "a conscious attempt to replace one culture and language with another that is considered 'superior'" particularly in reference to notions of indigenous as "pagan" and barbaric while European cultures and languages are considered "civilized". This continues in the experiences of Mexican children in the United States and in Mexico as English and Spanish are perpetually imposed as settler languages (most recently as a "civil right") without which the child and entire community will remain in a state of self-segregation and self-disenfranchisement. In reality, this continual imposition of language through assessment is, in fact, the primary cause of indigenous language morbidity and by extension, the subordination of sovereign peoples to the fiction of enfranchisement in the settler state. While full citizenship (not just enfranchisement), is also every human child's right, it should not come at the cost of another inherent human and collective right to nation and homeland.

Paraphrasing Octavio Paz' analysis of Mexico, Moguel goes on to note:

"the key difference was that the U.S. was a Christian Protestant nation with no significant indigenous identity - the culture and influence of the American Indian having been almost completely destroyed - while Mexico was a Roman Catholic nation centered on an indigenous history and identity. Paz argued that Mexican Catholicism, a combination of Spanish and indigenous traditions, had different approaches than European Protestantism toward freedom of thought and many other topics."  

On the one hand, this makes sense because reportedly at least 84% of "Hispanics/Latinos" in California are identified as being of "Mexican origin" as of 2014. Yet, on the other, Paz' analysis is dated and oversimplifies the realities and legacies of the colonial experience of Mexicans in both Mexico and the United States. Both historically and now, there is no one single overarching "indigenous" identity anywhere in the world, especially not in Mexico. The richness and complexity of Indigenous Peoples (not 'people' which denotes a strictly demographic description as opposed to the well-established reference to political and cultural entities with collective rights similar to but distinct from Westphalian states) cannot be oversimplified. Moguel clarifies that, “rather than take sides in a historical and theological debate, this article points to cultural legacies that many Latino students have inherited that may affect the way the students and their families approach the reading of books and other text.” Here, the question of cultural legacies, or more succinctly, culture, again frames the inherited or imposed constructs binding the discussion of our children and the Common Core. If culture affects approaches to literacy, we need not imagine the impacts of the imposition of one religion or another on Indigenous Peoples over time, the mere fact that the instruction and assessment are executed in the settler’s language of dominance is sufficient evidence to prove that Mexican indigenous children are disadvantaged and harmed.

To move from problem-posing to problem-solving is a sign of transformative learning. How ought our community resolve this conflict? Acknowledging the indigenous literary heritage of oral tradition almost as an afterthought, Moguel embedded his hope for public school classrooms in the, “students’ inherited legacies of oral traditions as a way to meet National Common Core Standards” (better known as Common Core State Standards). Oral tradition, I would argue, has much more to offer than an understanding of the effects of religion on the habits of literacy among “Latino” children. Beyond listing a variety of themes and practices associated with popular Mexican culture, Moguel never defines what he means by the term oral tradition nor explains how deep and rich this tradition actually is. Oral tradition is a literary and cultural complex set of bodies of knowledge - unique to each pueblo, tribe, nation and language indigenous to the Americas. Oral tradition is not another trivial innovation with which to replace the indigenous child’s language and culture with another - it ought to be a central qualifier to a decolonizing curriculum and pedagogy. According to the 2013 edition of the “California Common Core State Standards: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects” guide, it is clear that language, literacy and other academic skills highlighted therein are explicitly intended to apply to the text-based “use of formal English”. How then do indigenous students in U.S public schools bridge a cultural and economic divide in education? Analyzing the students has less to do with potential solutions than unmasking and dismantling the deculturalizing mechanisms incorporated into public schooling. The student is not the problem, the system of schooling is. Liberatory pedagogy, autonomous school initiatives with sufficient funding, multilingual Indigenous curricula and an indigenous teacher workforce capable of teaching in and through Indigenous language and knowledge will resolve the disparities between Indigenous students and their peers. Instead of demanding a right to assimilate, conscious educators, concerned parents and community-based organizations, whether Indigenous or not, ought to demand the inclusion of and privileging of Indigenous language education and curriculum founded upon Indigenous ways of knowing and the formation of Indigenous educational cadres capable of imparting a decolonizing and more liberatory educational experience. Tests only measure what was taught to be tested. Learning organized autonomously can transform the world.