Speaking Out for Social Action

In today's education policy debates, the other two Rs sometimes overshadow writing. Yet even those who are most intense about the importance of reading and math in school cannot deny the importance of writing. Learning to write means learning to speak out, to make one's voice heard in the great human conversation. And by teaching students to raise their voices through writing on social issues that concern them, we teach them to participate actively in a democracy.

When I talk about speaking out and being heard, I am not talking merely about writing school compositions, or even about eventually writing reports and letters as part of a job. I mean writing as a way of changing one's world. Empowering students to project their voices into the world, for real purposes and to real effect, is the ultimate goal of both language arts and social studies. It seems that teachers rarely reach for that goal directly, by guiding students to do what we hope they will do as adults: use writing to work for positive change in real-life situations.