Brandt, Sponsors of Literacy

Sponsors, as I’ve come to think of them, are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way…. Although the interests of the sponsor and the sponsor do not have to converge (and, in fact, may conflict), sponsors nevertheless set the terms for access to literacy and wield powerful incentives for compliance and loyalty. Sponsors are a tangible reminder that literacy learning … has always required permission, sanction, assistance, coercion, or, at minimum, contact with existing trade routes.   They also represent the causes into which people’s literacy usually gets recruited.

Intuitively, sponsors seemed a fitting term for the figures who turned up most typically in people’s memories of literacy learning: older relatives, teachers, priests, supervisors, military officers, editors, influential authors. Sponsors as we ordinarily think of them, are powerful figures who bankroll events or smooth the way for initiates. Usually richer, more knowledgeable, and more entrenched than the sponsored, sponsors nevertheless enter reciprocal relationship with those they underwrite.   They lend their resources or credibility to the sponsored but also stand to gain benefits from their success, whether by direct repayment or, indirectly, by credit of association….

In whatever form, sponsors deliver the ideological freight that must be born for access to what they have. Of course, the sponsored can be oblivious to our innovative with this ideological burden. Throughout history have acquired literacy pragmatically under the banner of others’ causes…. Most of the time, however, literacy takes its shape from the interests of the sponsors. And, …, obligations towards one’s sponsors run deep, affecting what, why, and how people write and read.

Literacy, like land, is a valuable commodity in this economy, a key resource in gaining profit and edge. This value helps to explain, of course, the lengths to which people will go to secure literacy for themselves or their children. But it also explains why the powerful work so persistently to conscript and ration the powers of literacy.

From Deborah Brandt, “Sponsors of Literacy”