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A comprehensive update of the classic study that delivers both a passionate plea and strategies for teachers, parents, and community organizers to give working-class children the same type of empowering education and powerful literacy skills that the children of upper- and middle-class people receive. The classic, indispensable guide for teachers, parents, and community organizers concerned with educating working-class children, "Literacy with an Attitude" dares to define literacy as a powerful right of citizenship. Patrick J. Finn persuasively debunks the time-honored paradigm for teaching poor and working-class students. Our job, he argues, is not to help such students to become middle class and live middle-class lives--most don't want it. Education rather should focus on a powerful literacy--a literacy with an attitude--that enables working-class and poor students to better understand, demand, and protect their civil, political, and social rights. This tenth-anniversary, second edition features eight new chapters and a new appendix, and a revised and updated original text. A bibliography and index are also included. [For the first edition, see ED434197.]

Teachers, parents, and older students need to understand the mechanisms that have subverted honest efforts to give working class children in the United States a decent education. This book discusses why this has happened and suggests ways to develop a pedagogy that makes progressive methods, education that empowers, and powerful literacy possible with working class students. These methods, based on the work of Paulo Freire, help teachers support each other for equity and justice. The chapters are: (1) "Title, Author, and Hard-Bitten Schoolteachers"; (2) "A Distinctly Un-American Idea: An Education Appropriate to Their Station"; (3) "Harsh Schools, Big Boys, and the Progressive Solution"; (4) "Oppositional Identity: Identifying 'Us' as 'Not Them'"; (5) "The Lads"; (6) "Changing Conditions--Entrenched Schools"; (7) "Class, Control, Language, and Literacy"; (8) "Where Literacy 'Emerges'"; (9) "Where Children Are Taught To Sit Still and Listen"; (10) "The Last Straw: There's Literacy, and Then There's Literacy"; (11) "Literacy with an Attitude"; (12) "Not Quite Making Literacy Dangerous Again"; (13) "Making Literacy Dangerous Again"; (14) "Taking Sides"; and (15) "Mad as Hell, and Not Going To Take It Any More." (Contains 22 endnotes and 116 references.) (SLD)

In 2000, 23.3% of adults in the United States were current smokers and approximately 70% of them reported the desire to quit smoking completely. Among the estimated 42.4% ever-smokers, 50.6% were former smokers ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2002). In other words, about one-half of U.S. ever-smokers become nonsmokers during their lives (Hughes, Keely, & Naud, 2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A drawing depicting a student's situation is presented.