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Land of the free, home of the brave,” I recited every morning at my public elementary school. I stood up and was reminded of the privilege it was to live in a place like America.“ In Africa, people live in huts made of leaves. They don’ t have any water to drink or food to eat. There is no school like ours. They cannot read.” My fifth-grade social studies teacher always scolded my class like this when she felt we were misbehaving.“ You should be appreciative that you’ re allowed to learn at all.”
A concept discussed by the scholar Deborah Brandt is a sponsor of literacy. What this refers to is the people who influence how one perceives and works with a specific type of literacy, defining it as“… any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy …”( 166). Specifically looking at the almost negative side of sponsors, I considered my early education. My fifthgrade teacher was a sponsor for influencing how I viewed the world outside America. Information was given to me by her, an authority, someone I was meant to look up to and trust, and therefore my beliefs began to shape around what I was told. As my sponsor, she made me believe that America was the only place in the world where people like me could exist.
As I got older, much to my surprise, I learned there are many places in Africa where people live in real houses with stoves and sinks of running water, reading books, and going to school just like I was, but in a different place. However, because my sponsors had never provided me with this information, I was left with what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls a“ single story” of an idea. In her TED Talk, Adichie describes a childhood where she read books written by British and American authors and would begin writing stories about children playing in the snow, which her homeland of Nigeria never experienced( Adichie). It wasn’ t until later when she saw that places like Britain viewed Nigeria in a similar way that I was taught in America – that it was an objectively poor and obsolete place filled with deserts and tribes and leafy huts. There was the belief that she and the people she knew were living a life below that of the British.
Like many others in the American public education system, I was fed a single story. With the limited information passed onto me by the sponsors meant to educate me, myself and my classmates were led into a belief that opposed reality and spread misinformation. It is interesting to consider the idea that education is just such: to teach and inform students of the world around them. Yet it took until my later years, when I was provided resources from some college professors and personal research, to see past the prejudice that was instilled upon me. My new sponsors introduced me to ideas of intersectionality and Adichie, giving me more than a single story.
Differing from my case, there is an article written by the highly regarded Malcolm X, notorious for teaching himself how to read and write. In his article, he describes how his time in prison – a place that school always taught me was bad and dirty and ruined one’ s life – was where he became influentially literate. With access to the prison library, Malcolm X enlightened himself with an in-
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