“Literacy is a right and not a privilege: a right that has been denied to an extraordinary number of citizens.” Guided by this belief, the authors of the twenty-nine essays in The Right to Literacy discuss what literacy is, what keeps people from attaining it, and how we can help them attain it.

The essays in this volume were originally presented at the 1988 Right to Literacy Conference in Ohio, an event that brought together a wide variety of literacy workers—school and college teachers, superintendents, principals, tutors, lawyers, community volunteers, researchers, librarians, labor union officials, prison literacy project coordinators, and state humanities council members. Their analyses are provocative, scholarly, often witty, and—most of all—readable.