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How Woke Marxists Stole Reading: What is Critical Literacy?
by Logan Lancing
“We are what we say and do. The way we speak and are spoken to help shape us into the people we become. Through words and other actions, we build ourselves in a world that is building us. That world addresses us to produce the different identities we carry forward in life: men are addressed differently than are women, people of color differently than whites, elite students differently than those from working families. Yet, though language is fateful in teaching us what kind of people to become and what kind of society to make, discourse is not destiny. We can redefine ourselves and remake society, if we choose, through alternative rhetoric and dissident projects. This is where critical literacy begins, for questioning power relations, discourses, and identities in a world not yet finished, just, or humane.” (Shor, 1999)[1]
What does it mean to be literate? This is the question we should be asking our educators.
Literacy is the ability to read and write. Our schools say they focus on literacy skills, but a quick survey of NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) data shows that two-thirds of U.S. children are unable to read with proficiency.2 Our children spend nearly two decades in a schoolhouse, yet many graduate without the ability to read and comprehend, for example, Gary Paulsen’s “Hatchet.”
There are many arguments one could forward to explain the disaster that is American education. Not least of which is the fact that our schools no longer define “literacy” as the ability to read and write. They define literacy as critical pedagogue Ira Shor (quoting Anderson and Irvine, 82’) defined it in 1999: “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations.”[3]
That is, they define “literacy” as being able to read the political ramifications of systemic power, which is to say to become a Critical Marxist.
I’ve discussed the Critical Turn in Education (both the book and the movement) at length in The Queering of the American Child (Lancing/Lindsay, 2024) and other places. I won’t rehash that here, aside from this single sentence summary, brought to us by Marxist educational scholar Isaac Gottesman: “the critical turn radicalized the field.”[4]
Ira Shor is one of those 60’s radicals who sprinted into education after the fall of Herbert Marcuse’s New Left in the 1970s. He was part of a new Left, an “Academic Left,” baptized into the Marxist faith and Paulo Freire’s “prophetic vision of social justice.” Shor wanted to develop “oppositional pedagogy,” as he calls it; a teaching theory and practice that taught students how to view the world, challenge the status quo and, as critical pedagogue Henry Giroux puts it, create the kingdom of God on Earth.[5]
Shor and his contemporaries spent decades developing “critical pedagogy,” the teaching theory and practices that develop “critical literacy,” or “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations.” What does this gobbledygook mean? It means Shor wanted to teach students how to read and write the world according to his Marxist faith and Freire’s prophetic vision.
Teaching someone to be critically literate is a brainwashing and thought-reform process, to borrow the terminology of cult expert Robert Jay Lifton. If a person is critically literate, they have learned to use the process of reading and writing as a mediator for spiritual development, leading to a marked change in one’s consciousness. That is to say, learning to read and write critically is an initiation process into the Marxist faith, a process that culminates in “critical consciousness” and awakened (Woke) spirituality.
In this elevated state, learners see themselves as “historically constructed within specific power relations,” meaning they see themselves not as individual and rational actors but as collectivists whose experiences and very being—their conception of what and who they are—have been delimited and determined in advance. A person who is critically conscious believes himself to be enlightened; he has received the revealed word not of God, but of Man and His History.
“Critical literacy is language use that questions the social construction of the self. When we are critically literate, we examine our ongoing development, to reveal the subjective positions from which we make sense of the world and act in it.” (Shor, 1999)
Critical literacy, then, is about taking apart and rebuilding yourself in line with Marxist faith!
To understand this critical point, we have to talk about Marx. Karl Marx argued that humans create society, and that society then conditions future humans to think, behave, and act in certain ways. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as he puts it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Therefore, people aren’t born into society as free agents capable of expressing their creativity, thinking for themselves, and living for the species (what Marx called “species-being”). They are socialized into a society already saturated with culture, customs, norms, and laws that condition them to be a certain way; that conditions them to live not freely and on their own terms, but on the terms of the existing society. In this view, we are created by the progress of History; we are the products of the History we continually make. In short, “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”
Critical literacy is the ability to read this socialization and conditioning process so one can determine how they were created by society. Today, this involves convincing children that they are not rational individual actors; they are avatars for various “identity groups.” A boy isn’t a boy—he’s a black boy and he must know it. History has “constructed race” to stamp his skin with the sigh of the oppressed creature. He doesn’t have access to “whiteness” and the privilege it entails.
Worse, he must know that the concept of “boy” was “historically constructed within specific power relations,” meaning there is no such thing as “boy” or “girl.” Some people in a bygone society unjustly created and defined the categories of “boy” and “girl,” “man” and “woman,” for their own self-serving purposes. That is to say, some people (men) with privilege and power created the gender binary to benefit themselves while alienating everyone else.
The boy must be taught to read his world—and all of History, for that matter—critically. Reading must become a mediator for his spiritual awakening; a mediator for the development of his critical consciousness. Only after being initiated into this new faith—as a New Man—can he begin to write the New World according to the “prophetic vision of social justice.” Only after finding his new faith will he be prepared to do the activism required of his conscience.
Critical literacy has nothing to do with learning to read and write. It has everything to do with learning to read the world critically and create (write) the kingdom of God here on Earth.
So, are our children focusing on their literacy skills, or their critical literacy skills, in the classroom? The National Council of Teachers of English posted a position statement in March of 2019 that reads, “Resolved that the National Council of Teachers of English promote pedagogy and scholarly curricula in English and related subjects that instruct students in civic and critical literacy.”[6]
Critical literacy is a cornerstone of “culturally relevant teaching,” a practice that nearly all schools now engage in. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has a nifty “Critical Literacy Overview” [7] document that lists “four basic dimensions to the critical literacy framework in the classroom”:
Disrupting the commonplace: considering “new frames from which to understand experience” through varied texts, analysis of language, and critique.
Considering multiple viewpoints: considering our own viewpoints and viewpoints of others.
Focusing on the sociopolitial: interrogating how “sociopolitical systems and power relationships shape perceptions, responses, and actions.”
Taking action: taking informed action in service of social justice.
This is Marxist brainwashing and radical activation calling itself “critical literacy” so it can pass itself off to unsuspecting parents, teachers, and children as a literacy lesson.
Ira Shor is one of thousands of critical educators focused on how to teach learners to develop critical literacy in the classroom. What has it achieved? Well, ask yourself: can our children read and write, or are they too busy reading and writing their world with Marxist analysis and activism?
Marx, the God. Marcuse, His Prophet. Mao, His Sword.
by Logan Lancing
I recently read a document released by the CIA in 2005 that describes the New Left and Herbert Marcuse's influence on college campuses. What it reveals is extremely relevant to what's happening on college campuses today.
"Marx, the god; Marcuse, his prophet; Mao, his sword."
In June of 1968, the Current Digest of the Soviet Press released a scathing article, calling University of California San Diego professor Herbert Marcuse a “false prophet.” As a Soviet entity, the Current Digest set out to annihilate Marcuse’s “decommunized Marxism,” for obvious reasons. Marcuse had abandoned “vulgar” Marxism and the USSR’s bureaucratic and administrative terror in favor of his personal flavor of faith: Identity Marxism.
The TL;DR version of Marcuse’s theory goes like this: Free market economies stabilize the working class. Marx predicted the working class would necessarily enter open revolt against the system once their economic and material conditions became too brutal to bear. This, Marx argued, was a scientific prediction, predicated on what activists now call the “immortal science of Marxism.” In other words, just as you can predict that the apple will fall if you let go of it, Marxists predicted “capitalism” would inevitably fall after running its course in advanced industrial societies—it was only a matter of time.
But free market economies adjusted, and by the 1950s and 60s it was clear that free market economies improved the lives of workers. Marxists admitted this, reluctantly. For them, it was a crisis of faith. The “immortal science of Marxism” was clearly wrong, both on a moral level, as revealed by all of the starving and dead people, and on an economic level, as revealed by workers buying nice cars and taking their families on nice holidays.
Marcuse theorized that the working class must mostly be abandoned as first movers in a Communist revolution. The working class was too stable, and revolutions require instability to work. So, he argued, Marxists must place their energy in college kids, “ghetto populations,” criminal aliens (illegal immigrants), and anyone else who might feel marginalized by society, such as gays and lesbians, the unemployed, and war veterans. If you can radicalize these groups and centralize their grievances, Marcuse thought, then you can build a coalition that can break the working class from the inside. As the New York Times would publish in the wake of Marcuse’s death in 79’:
Dr. Marcuse had little belief that the working class would, in affluent, highly technological societies, incite revolution. Rather, he believed, a new coalition of student radicals, small numbers of intellectuals, urban blacks and people from underdeveloped nations could overthrow forces that he saw as keeping workers from an awareness of their oppression.
(For more information on this important point, read “An Essay on Liberation” (Marcuse, 1969).)
The Current Digest was responding to the meteoric rise of Marcuse and his new theory of Marxism when it published “Marcuse: ‘False Prophet of Decommunized Marxism’” in June of 1968. Marcuse and his “vociferous disciples” scared the USSR because they had been converted to a new faith; a new interpretation of Marxism that “[has] special gods” and challenged the USSR’s stranglehold.
Marcuse, Marcuse, Marcuse-the name of this 70-year-old “German-American philosopher,” which has emerged form the darkness of obscurity, has been endlessly repeated in the Western press. In Bonn the name is pronounced Markoozeh; in New York, Markyooz; in Paris, Markyooss. The California resident who has undertaken to disprove Marxism is being publicized as if he were a movie star, and his books as if they were the latest brand of toothpaste or razor blades. A clever publicity formula has even been thought up: “the three M’s”—“Marx, the god; Marcuse, his prophet; and Mao, his sword.”
Marx remained “the god,” but Marcuse was his latest prophet, and the USSR hated his interpretations of their shared doctrine. If Marcuse spent his life in “dark obscurity,” his prophecy—identity-based Marxism rather than economic Marxism as the lever of revolution—wouldn’t have bothered the USSR. But Marcuse had reached astronomical popularity in the tumultuous 60s, and, worst of all, he had adopted the revolutionary strategies of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, founder of the People’s Republic of China.
Mao’s formula of Cultural Revolution proved to be incredibly successful in a gigantic, mostly agrarian society that was the last place Marx would have predicted Communist revolution to take hold. His strategy was straightforward: radicalize the easily brainwashed students and use them as a lever to bulldoze everything and consolidate his own power. Kids are extremely idealistic, and have few defense mechanisms for fighting off the “totalizing” nature of “thought reform,” as Robert Jay Lifton, expert on cult psychology broadly, and Mao’s system specifically, might describe it.
In an interview with Pierre Viansson-Ponte in Paris of 1969, Marcuse said that “certainly today every Marxist who is not a communist of strict obedience is a Maoist.” Marcuse was very familiar with Mao’s “Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics,” and, according to the Current Digest, a central focus of Marcuse’s revolutionary strategy was precisely what Mao had accomplished in China with his Red Guards.
Marcuse replaces the class struggle in present-day society by the “generational conflict.” Flattering the students, he assures them that they are the chief revolutionary force, since, as Nouvel Observatuer wrote in summarizing his “doctrine,” “they are young and reject the society of their elders.” Therefore, “young people in general” must struggle against “adults in general.” Everywhere and anywhere!
Additionally,
It is characteristic that his “interpretation of prophetic revelation for the uninitiated” invariably coincides with the practice of Mao Tse-tung’s group. And what is of the greatest significance is that although this group does not stint on abusive language aimed at the imperialists, the governments of the capitalist states have very tolerant attitudes toward dissemination of its “ideas,” and at the same time toward the activities of Marcuse and his vociferous disciples as well.
What you are seeing on college campuses today is nothing new. If you are curious enough and take the initiative to investigate what’s happening, you will find that Karl Marx is still the god, Marcuse is still his prophet, and Mao is still his sword. There is a reason these kids and their enablers and directors all sound like Communists: they are.
The form of rebellion you are witnessing isn’t the “vulgar” kind you may be familiar with—a great Proletarian Revolution. It is a new kind, one that Marcuse said is, “Very different from the revolution at previous stages of history,” because, “this opposition is directed against the totality of a well-functioning, prosperous society—a protest against its Form—the commodity form of men and things, against the imposition of false values and a false morality.”
For today’s Communists, “the issue isn’t the issue; the issue is the revolution,” as David Horowitz reminded us. Make no mistake—the majority of the college kids revolting on campus have no idea what they are doing. They are in a cult, one with Marx at the top, the doctrinal revelation of Herbert Marcuse in the middle, and Mao’s revolutionary strategy at the ground level. This already happened in the 60s, but we put an end to it. The doctrine has now evolved, updating Marcuse’s prophecies through a “woke” lens (intersectionality, primarily), but it’s all the same strategy.
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