Gloria Gannaway Transforming Mind:
A Critical Cognitive Activity brings to focus the debate over cultural literacy, a debate that recycles old assumptions and values regarding the meaning and usefulness of literacy. As Gannaway points out, cultural legionnaires such as E. D. Hirsch support the notion that cultural literacy is a matter of banking the values of our "common culture." This position, unfortunately, still informs the vast majority of educational programs and manifests its logic in the renewed emphasis on the romanticized "good old days" of our Western heritage.

For the notion of cultural literacy to become useful, it must be situated within a theory of cultural production and viewed as an integral part of the way in which people produce, transform, and reproduce meaning. Cultural literacy must be seen as a medium that constitutes and affirms the historical and existential moments of lived experience that produce a subordinate or lived culture. Hence, it is an eminently political phenomenon, and must be analyzed within the context of a theory of power relations and an understanding of social and cultural reproduction and production.

Gannaway's book challenges and deconstructs the process by . . .