Flashback to senior year in high school. My then boyfriend and I are talking about grades and school. He’s complaining about busy work and homework in general. Roughly paraphrased, he said something along the lines of “It doesn’t matter. Why should I have to do it?” I was a bit flabbergasted, since I was the student who did their work because I was told to and I did it well. He continued, saying “What’s the point of working hard for grades? What do I get out of it?”
An argument ensued, and I, to this day, believe I won. “The point of working hard,” I said, “Is to get good grades. Then you can get into the college you want and hopefully get a scholarship. After that you graduate with a degree to do what you want to do; since you have that scholarship, you graduate in less debt than you would have without it. You get a job with your degree, and then you use your money to do what you want with your life!”
He thought it was bullshit that people needed to “play the game” to get what you want. I can see where he was coming from. It’s frustrating to know that getting what we want out of life includes jumping through a bunch of different hoops.
If we apply this to literacy, literacy turns into one of the hoops. Literacy is something people have to gain if they want to make life easier. You want a job? You’re going to need to literate most of the time. You want to get a scholarship to a university? Again, Literacy is one of the many hoops you have to jump through in a series of hoops to get to what you want.
Deborah Brandt points out that the interests of the sponsor and the person they are sponsoring don’t always converge. You don’t have to want the same things as the person who is helping you; you may want the A+ on that paper to get into college while your teacher just wants to know you grasp the material.
So, what’s in it for me? What’s in the literacy sponsorship that other people have provided for me? Now that we’ve discussed all the ways that Literacy benefits a person and how they’re perceived, I’d say that literacy gives me grace, power, and social standing.
How about you? What does Literacy give you? What’s in literacy for you?
