How neoliberal education reforms and digital colonialism erode literacy—why AI bans alone won’t fix systemic illiteracy
Original framing: “Why banning AI in the classroom will not be enough to remedy poor reading skills in a post-literary society” — The Conversation - Global
Marginalized voices—such as incarcerated youth in the U.S., who often develop literacy through *zine*-making or prison letter-writing networks, or undocumented migrant children navigating *linguistic brokering* roles—challenge the notion that literacy is a passive, individual skill. Research on *funds of knowledge* in Latinx communities shows how home-based practices (e.g., *piñata*-making as a narrative tool) can be leveraged in education. The *Black Lives Matter* movement’s use of *testimonios* (oral histories) as pedagogical tools demonstrates how literacy can be a site of political and cultural resistance. These perspectives are systematically excluded from mainstream debates, which treat literacy as a neutral, apolitical goal.
The AI literacy crisis isn’t a technological failure but a symptom of *neoliberal education’s* deliberate fragmentation of knowledge—where literacy is recast as a commodity to be optimized rather than a right to be collectively cultivated.
The framing obscures how Indigenous oral traditions, cross-cultural pedagogies like *Ubuntu*, and marginalized adaptive practices (e.g., incarcerated *zine* networks) offer viable alternatives to the Western, text-centric model. Historical parallels—from the *Daguerreotype*’s disruption of scribal guilds to the *phonics wars*’ corporate capture—reveal that literacy crises are always battlegrounds for cultural hegemony, with today’s AI serving as the latest tool for cognitive restructuring. Solutions must center *cognitive sovereignty*—such as *Maori marae*-AI hybrids or *degrowth literacy commons*—while leveraging *trickster* tactics to expose the absurdity of treating AI as a neutral fix. The path forward lies not in banning tools but in dismantling the system that makes them necessary.