After Literacy: Essays

by John Willinsky

This collection of essays tackles what comes of learning to read and write after literacy has been achieved. These essays take up notable gaps in all that has been said and written about literacy in the schools, moving beyond the idea that learning to read and write is an end in itself. They are about the power that reading and writing has over the world. These essays deal with what the young are to make of the world while reading in a postmodern era and how they respond to the way new technologies can narrow the gap between school and work worlds. Others confront the authorities, whether of dictionaries that would dictate meaning or of cultures that would shape identities. They also pursue the personal side of Willinsky’s own life in the language, tracking what has followed for him from this getting of literacy. The book is concerned, as a whole, with how we can become better students of literacy’s impact on our lives. It teaches us to attend to the promises and challenges, as well as the pleasures, that come after having taken a basic hold of language’s literate possibilities.

Paperback

First published November 5, 2001