Fighting Prosaic Messages. A Portrait of Family Literacies with Critical Essays on the Causes of School Failure

Part historical fiction, part memoir, part philosophy of education, this book begins with a story about a womans immigration into the U.S. and how three of her generations struggled in the U.S. school system. The book ends with an analysis of why many students fail in school, and what we can do about it. Through story and analysis, this book offers a critique of the U.S. education systemin 3 parts. Part one imagines what the immigration experience was like in the past, and reads like historical fiction. Part two looks at the ensuing three generations in the present, and reads like a memoir. Part three gleans lessons from the story as a whole for what we can do better in the future. In the historical fiction part, a Sicilian woman named Rose emigrates to the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century. Knowing no English and illiterate but armed with a moral intelligence, she struggles in this strange world of the free, rubs shoulders with some of the great thinkers of her day, and discusses the nature of education with them. Shes one of the many prosaic heroes history books and schools sometimes forget. In the memoir part, Roses son Henry, the authors father, drops out of school in the eighth grade to help his single mom by selling newspapershe never thought he was smart enough for school anyway. His son Henry Jr. goes all the way in school to obtain a PhD, but struggles to find a voice along the way. Henry Jr.s son Justin was seemingly born with an expressive voice, but in his...