This article considers contemporary policy claims about "what literacy is" and "what literacy does." First, the article reviews in-depth the ways in which development discourses define literacy, and the claims made in development discourses about the "consequences" of literacy for economic and political development. I…

A fundamental worldwide trend of the past few decades has been the remarkable expansion of national systems of formal education. Two competing theories have been adduced to explain how this expansion affects patterns of equality of educational opportunity. The thesis of industrialization holds that educational expansion tends to increase equality…