Literacy Wars: Why Teaching Children to Read and Write Is a Battleground in Australia

The Literacy Wars

The Literacy Wars

Why teaching children to read and write

is a battleground in Australia

Ilana Snyder

First published in 2008

Copyright © Ilana Snyder 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Snyder, Ilana, 1949– .

    The literacy wars: why teaching children to read and write is a

     battleground

    in Australia.

ISBN 978 1 741754 24 7 (pbk.).

Includes index.

Bibliography.

Literacy – Government policy – Australia.

Literacy – Australia.

Culture conflict – Australia.

Educational change – Australia.

Education – Australia.

302.22440994

Set in 11.5/14pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Literacy under attack

2 Grammar

3 Reading

4 Culture

5 Gender

6 Testing

7 Technology

8 Curriculum

9 Literacy fights back

References

Acknowledgments

There are many people to thank for their contribution to the writing of this book. Colleagues, friends and family gave me ideas, critical feedback and encouragement.

Thanks to Simon Marginson, Allan Luke, Peter Freebody, Jane Kenway, Eva Gold and Alan Gold for reading the proposal, and to Simon Marginson, Allan Luke, Viv Ellis, Mastin Prinsloo and Dimitris Koutsogiannis for reading the first draft. Their insights and suggestions were invaluable.

Thanks also to: Marion Meiers and Christine Ludwig for information and materials; Bill Green, Julian Sefton-Green and Scott Bulfin for ideas and resources; the Literacy Inquiry List, run by Brian Cambourne, for print-media materials on the debates; Nick Burbules for a discussion about binaries; Urszula Clark for a conversation about the National Literacy Strategy in England; Tony Mackay for our exchanges about curriculum; and Colin Lankshear and Bill Green for the explanation of literacy in the introduction, which is how we explained it in Teachers and Technoliteracy.

My gratitude goes to Ben Snyder for being the very first reader of a draft chapter; Ray Snyder for his continuous engagement; Gabe Snyder and Sally Greenberg for looking after Ruby when we went to Vancouver; and Dulcie Kanatopsky for her sustained interest.

The book would not have been written without research leave provided by Monash University. The time at Oxford University and the University of British Columbia gave me the opportunity to talk about my ideas with academics and research students before I began to write the book in Melbourne.

As always, Elizabeth Weiss, publisher at Allen & Unwin, was enthusiastic and offered excellent advice. Rebecca Kaiser managed the editorial phase with consummate skill and good humour. I also thank Susan Jarvis for her careful checking of the manuscript.

1 Literacy under attack

‘The Literacy Debate’ was the lead story in the Weekend Australian of 23–24 September 2006. The front-page puff piece for the coverage within affirmed the paper’s support for the ‘neutral, apolitical teaching of English’ (Ferrari 2006a). It was accompanied by a cartoon that encapsulated many parents’ anxiety about their children’s literacy. Said a young boy in response to his father’s concern about the quality of his homework: ‘Don’t worry. I can google my way through life.’ There were also two more articles, five images and an editorial—all dedicated to the failings of literacy education. There was only one piece that defended current practice. This was a major offensive in the literacy wars as they are fought in the print media.

Central to the assault on literacy education were extracts from an article by David Freesmith (2006a), an English teacher at Adelaide’s Prince Alfred College, which had been published several months earlier in the teachers’ journal English in Australia. Freesmith (2006b) had accused the Australian of mounting a political and ideological attack on critical literacy but of failing to understand it. The goal of critical literacy, he explained, is to create a questioning, critical, ethical citizenry; critical literacy is integral to a healthy democracy. Abridged to the point of incoherence, his defence of critical literacy was set up to compare badly with the other contributions. Literacy Wars 1 31/1/08 10:06:08 AM

Freesmith pointed out that the latest round in the debate about critical literacy had been sparked by academic Wayne Sawyer’s editorial in English in Australia. Disappointed at Howard’s re-election in 2004, Sawyer (2004, p. 8) had asked whether a critical literacy needed to become ‘more direct and deliberate in its ethics and its critical stance’ against a government that had lied about refugees throwing their children overboard, set up detention centres and gone to war with Iraq, despite evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Sawyer’s musings have been used over and over by the Australian to caricature the enemy.

There was a lengthy response to Freesmith by Kenneth Wiltshire (2006), J.D. Story Professor of Public Administration at the University of Queensland’s business school, and chairman of the review of Queensland’s curriculum under the Goss government. The focus of the literacy debate, wrote Wiltshire, is the core curriculum and who decides its content. Endorsing the Australian’s stance against teaching school students critical literacy in English, he said that school was for ‘basics and knowledge, certainly accompanied by critical thinking, but not in a milieu where all is relative and there are no absolutes’.

Wiltshire dismissed critical literacy as ‘at best negative and at worst nihilistic’, holding it responsible for ‘dumbing down’ the curriculum. He concluded with a tribute to the Australian, which he said had ‘played a vital role as a national presence for the fourth estate in our robust democracy’, providing ‘a forum for intellectuals of both the Left and Right’. He commended the way the paper had handled the literacy debate in exposing the ‘reality of our education systems’. There was not a hint of irony in Wiltshire’s judgment of the Murdoch newspaper.

With captions that drew on his words, four pictures illustrated Wiltshire’s article. Under a photo of a statue, representing a man deep in thought, the caption read: ‘Our culture: Aristotle is still valid today.’ There were also photos with captions of the Howard government’s three education ministers: ‘Reform views: Brendan Nelson’, ‘Idealistic: David Kemp’ and ‘Explicit values: Julie Bishop’. Not all readers would have agreed with Wiltshire’s portrayal of the ministers responsible for educational leadership and policy in Australia since 1996.

The second response to Freesmith was written by Kevin Donnelly (2006f ), former chief of staff to Liberal minister Kevin Andrews and an education consultant who writes often for the Australian on literacy matters. Describing himself as a ‘conservative education warrior’, Donnelly declared that he was proud to be part of the Australian’s two-year campaign that began in 2004 ‘against political correctness in education and the destructive influence of critical literacy and postmodern theory’ on the school curriculum. Instead of valuing ‘the moral and aesthetic quality of literary greats’, claimed Donnelly, students are taught to ‘deconstruct’ the words of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. The result? Students leave school with a ‘fragmented and disjointed understanding’, the victims of ‘postmodern claptrap’.

Illustrating Donnelly’s article was a picture of a male teacher with a sheet of paper in his hand, standing in the middle of a class of what looked like Year 8 or 9 students. The teacher was talking and some of the students were looking at him. Aimed at ridiculing postmodern approaches to the study of literature, the caption read: ‘Deconstructing the Bard: Macbeth is examined in terms of patriarchal concerns with order and gender’. Macbeth, a staple of the English curriculum across the states of Australia, is usually studied with older students. There were no books to suggest the reading of a play, nor the kind of engagement that might be expected in a drama lesson. Without an obvious connection between the stock photo of a classroom and Donnelly’s accusations, the header, ‘Subject for Complaint’, printed in a very large font, was required to deliver the message.

Although in this instance the effect of misusing an image was benign, there were traces of the media manipulation employed by the Coalition government in the ‘Children Overboard’ affair, referred to by Wayne Sawyer in his editorial. Just prior to the election in 2001, when the polls were not predicting a Howard victory, government ministers told the Australian people that blurred images of a boat and people in the water depicted illegal immigrants throwing their children overboard. The prime minister used the photos as ‘evidence’ of the ‘kind of people’ who were trying to get into Australia without going through the ‘proper’ processes. Many commentators have attributed the re-election of the Coalition for a third term to this cynical misrepresentation of images for political gain.

Without anything new to add to the debate, the editorial (Editorial, 2006b) recycled opinions that the paper has paraded regularly since 2004: ‘[y]oung Australians must be taught how to think and write, not what to think and write,’ it pronounced. Opposed to the dissection of the Western canon according to ‘Marxist, feminist or racial analysis rather than according to the universal truths such as love, hate, pride, ambition and jealousy’, the editorial rejected Freesmith’s views as part of the ‘lunatic fringe’. It presented the writers at the Australian as a united team with a shared view on literacy education: ‘We are unabashed fans of the modern Western liberal democracy, the literary canon and Judeo-Christian values.’

The editorial referred to academic Wayne Martino (1994), whose words, plucked from the journal English in Australia, have been used repeatedly in the Australian to exemplify the arcane language of the promoters of critical literacy. Wrote Martino: ‘the English classroom is conceptualised as a socio-political site where alternative reading positions can be made available to students outside of an oppressive male–female dualistic hierarchy—outside of an oppressive phallogocentric signifying system for making meaning.’ (1994, p. 39) The sentence may be theoretically dense and overly complex but, like Freesmith and Sawyer, Martino was writing for a professional audience, not the readers of a newspaper. The editorial concluded by anticipating the ‘inevitable passing of critical literacy into the large well of dumped educational fads’.

The following week, the Australian published a number of letters on the Literacy Debate. Except for Freesmith’s self-defence, most supported the views expressed by Wiltshire, Donnelly and the editorial. On Wednesday, 27 September, the newspaper’s agenda was given further weight when senior political writer Paul Kelly (2006) entered the fray. He urged the federal government to intervene in determining the content of the school curriculum ‘on behalf of the interests of parents and children’.

Kelly repeated some of Wiltshire’s accusations—the reign of deconstruction as an approach to the study of texts, knowledge-free curricula and the absence of standards and accountability. He called for ‘a transparent review of what is being taught, its effect and its rationale’. Kelly also ridiculed Wayne Sawyer’s editorial as indicative of the ideological base of English teaching in Australian schools and criticised the website of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English for supporting Sawyer’s views. Kelly’s only concession to teachers was his suggestion that reform would get nowhere unless ‘it carries the teachers, improves their status and values their professionalism’.

What were readers to make of the Australian’s treatment of the literacy debates? Those who are not experts in literacy education, but who have entrusted their children to schools, must have been alarmed at the wildly different views about what constitutes a good literacy education. How were they to interpret the polarised positions? For readers who believe that literacy education is simply about teaching children and young people an unchanging, fixed set of basic skills, the Australian’s coverage spoke directly to them. Even readers who suspect that there might be more nuanced and balanced ways of thinking about literacy could not have helped but be concerned.

As mentioned, the national newspaper has run a succession of articles promoting a similar political line since 2004. More than half of them have been written by Kevin Donnelly. Dissenting views have been published from time to time as op-ed pieces, but most often as letters to the editor. For people interested in learning about the challenges facing literacy education at the beginning of the twenty-first century, reading the Australian would suggest that the debates are fierce but that only one side has the answers—those with different views are dismissed as part of the ‘loony left’. Rather than facilitating public discourse about literacy issues, the Australian has actually suppressed such discussion.

The articles published that weekend in September 2006 highlighted some of the questions central to the media debates about literacy education. Should there be a core literacy curriculum? How much attention should be given to basic literacy skills? Which books should be included in a literature course? Does popular culture have a place in the English classroom? Has the English curriculum been dumbed down? What does postmodern theory have to offer literacy education? Should critical literacy be an integral component of the curriculum? To what extent are the battles over literacy about other things?

Literacy education is of great interest to everyone, young and old, because understanding written words—whether in print or on a screen—is something that most people do every day, often many times over. Also, everyone is an expert and has an opinion about how reading and writing should be taught, as everyone has been to school. These reasons help explain why the literacy debates command so much attention in the media. However, they are only part of the answer. The debates command so much attention because they are rarely just about literacy, as illustrated in the articles and images published in the Australian in September 2006. They are also related to broader ‘social and cultural issues, and to political and economic forces’ (Green et al. 1997, p. 22). These broader issues and forces affect, even determine, the form and content of the debates about literacy in the media.

Debates or wars?

Characterising contemporary media coverage of literacy education as the literacy wars captures the intensity and force of the controversies. Competing views—from which method to use for teaching reading to the choice of texts for a Year 12 English course—have become battlegrounds. However, it is the defenders of traditional approaches to literacy, not the advocates of contemporary practice, who have enjoyed consistent media attention. Before the Coalition gained office, the conservative forces were sometimes given a run in the press but not with the relentless regularity of the Howard years.

In their attacks, the conservative literacy warriors often employ abusive language directed against their adversaries. Literacy teachers are accused of lowering standards by using child-centred approaches that do not provide children with a strong foundation in literacy learning. The attacks extend to what literacy teachers and educators say about literacy and how they say it, dismissing anything more complex than a simple sentence as edu-babble.The aim of the concerted attacks has been to raise public anxiety and undermine confidence in literacy education. Under the Howard government, public concern has reached new heights, with many people now believing that there is a literacy crisis.

However, the notion of a literacy crisis is not a new phenomenon. Literacy crises have been declared at other points in Australian history and have usually arisen in relation to socioeconomic change of some kind. Each time, there are reports in the print media, letters to the editor and discussion on talk back radio as teachers, unions, professional organisations, academics and parents respond.The effect is always powerful, with the public assuming that there is a literacy problem and that educational systems and teachers are to blame. Although the word ‘crisis’ has not been used as often as in the 1990s, the pattern remains the same.

The literacy wars are not restricted to Australia. In the United States in the early 1990s, the reading wars raged and, more recently, George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, with its narrow focus on maths and reading test scores, has provoked deep division in the education community. In England, when Tony Blair first took office, he proclaimed that his government was concerned with education, education, education. But his reforming zeal will be remembered more for imposing the prescriptive National Literacy Strategy, with its controversial Literacy Hour, and for the failure to reach national targets for primary and secondary students’ literacy as measured in standardised tests.

In some respects, the Australian literacy wars are a version of the American culture wars that began in the 1980s, especially as they related to schools. The battles were over the kind of knowledge young people need to participate in life as informed citizens. The school was seen as the site to build cultural literacy and a national cultural identity. Conservative critics of the school curriculum complained that there was too much attention to cultural diversity and not enough to the unifying function a common national culture should assume. By contrast, the supporters of progressive approaches regarded such views as dangerously narrow, a threat to cultural diversity and freedom of belief and expression.

Two decades later, the Australian progeny of the American cultural critics have sought to discredit a literacy curriculum they believe is afflicted by relativism, fragmentation and a fix-ation on contemporary social issues. They have poured scorn on the teaching profession and institutions of teacher education, accusing them of damaging traditional educational values. Their mission is greater emphasis in schools on cultural literacy, the literature of the Western canon and traditional values.

In response, literacy teachers and educators argue that we can’t turn the clock back, nor should we want to. There have been enormous changes in the world of ideas—due to science but also due to feminism, multiculturalism and social justice. These ideas cannot be ignored, and giving attention to them in the literacy classroom does not mean that there is no place for the enduring values and traditions of the classics and Australia’s cultural heritage.

Although no one has died in these wars and those charged in this book with waging them are accused of no more than expressing their conservative views, there have been casualties. The persistent denigration of literacy teachers by the conservative critics in the media has damaged the morale of those charged with the responsibility of educating the next generation of citizens. Hard-working and underpaid, with out the social regard they deserve, literacy teachers have been bewildered, but also angered, by their characterisation as postmodern radicals. Moreover, the collateral damage for the students in the classrooms of these battle-weary teachers and their confused parents cannot be under-estimated.

The conservative critics, who have a straightforward message for the public about the literacy wastelands of Australian schools, have been able to promote their views, not just in the tabloids and on talkback radio, but also in the more respected newspapers. Their repeated attacks in the media have armed members of the Coalition government with the vocabulary to malign literacy teachers and educators—which they do, often, in their speeches and in their press releases. What is more, the attacks have had repercussions for policy decisions and funding. This is the political context in which The Literacy Wars was written.

The literacy wars

This book provides a critical account of the literacy wars. Its purpose is to examine and evaluate the substance and viability of the arguments, claims and beliefs intrinsic to the conflicts. The book considers the main arenas of contestation: grammar, reading, culture, gender, testing, technology and curriculum. Each chapter covers a different battlefield by providing some historical background and explaining the vocabulary of the particular conflict and the positions of the adversaries.

No assumptions are made about readers’ knowledge of key concepts and, wherever possible, reference is made to research findings as a source of evidence to assess the various claims by the warring factions. Organising the battlefields into separate chapters is, of course, somewhat artificial as they are all linked to each other and overlap in complex ways. However, this structure has provided me with a systematic and generative way to think about the literacy wars and my hope is that readers will also find it useful.

Considerable attention is given to the role the press has played in shaping the public agenda and informing the debates. Although the literacy wars have also featured on radio, television and the internet, certain elements of the print media have been responsible for their escalation since 2004. The role of a serious press is to provide the public with information and commentary from a range of different perspectives. To a large extent, this has not been the case in the coverage of the literacy debates in Australia during the Howard years.

Despite any early impression, it is not only the Australian that is subjected to scrutiny. However, it was the Murdoch paper’s crusade against contemporary approaches to literacy education that motivated me to write the book. In recent years, the Australian’s in-house opinion shapers have been accorded astonishing privilege and power. Their goal has been to dictate a reactionary model for the secondary school English curriculum. It is time to hold them to account.

This chapter ends with an explanation of the meaning of literacy and why it provokes such strong feelings. Literacy is not easy to explain.