Notes on literacy in school

(This article was recently published in "Hard Times for English Teaching" SHA March 2002)

The present discussions of literacy in school seem to me to be inseparable from the fundamental question of what the school is supposed to be for. Literacy does not exist in the abstract: it is an expression of competence in a literature which serves a purpose in the culture to which it belongs. But the school does not seem to know to what culture it belongs: it is the plaything of government, and its whipping boy. It has sacrificed its academic priority in the face of pressure from a utilitarian culture which in trying to be all things to all men has lost its sense of identity and purpose. Since contemporary society increasingly replaces the accuracy and permanence of the written word with the ambiguity of the fleeting visual image, or the ephemeral cleverness of the sound-bite, the culture in which most students live and which the school is expected to serve is not a literate culture. Its values are primarily expressed through the visual and aural media, not through writing. So how can we possibly respond to a demand for literacy in school from a society which demonstrates every day how little value it actually places on literacy?

The idea that we can teach and subsequently measure success in teaching "literacy skills" implies that there is no difference in meaning between literacy and reading or writing. But there is a lot more to it than that. Literacy cannot be understood apart from the culture to which it belongs and which it helps to articulate. It is always linked to a purposive body of writing (a literature) within which the reader is said to be literate. This body of writing will be in some sense interpretive and critical of its societal context. So we can speak of functional literacy. Someone can be generally "literate" in the sense that they can read and write common words and understand notices, newspaper articles or even text-books, but still be functionally illiterate in relationship to a specific critical and interpretive literature: a functional literature. Literacy is the ability to participate in the imaginative life of a culture; both by absorbing and re-living its insights in reading, and adding to them- in writing. But by comparison with say the period between the wars, contemporary society does not actually use literacy in a functional way.

In school the emphasis is on the students' understanding of text-books and their ability to write about school subjects. (The question of "oracy" is of course a related issue.) Here the problem again is that literacy only exists within a specific context, and the uses of English within the school are too diverse for there to be a single idiomatic "literature". Language in school constantly works against itself. Teachers as a group cannot offer a literacy when they themselves are not working within a single coherent linguistic frame. The old "Language across the Curriculum" initiative failed partly because the different subject areas have had highly specific languages imposed on them by government agencies and examination boards, partly because individual teachers come from such diverse linguistic backgrounds (how much simpler it would be if we all came from Kidlington) and partly because of the transitional and provisional nature of the English language at the present time- the huge influx of loanwords, coinages and new usages.

So a working re-statement of the problem might be to ask how we can find a language to teach and to teach with which can actually be understood. The vocabulary of specialism in which many subjects now have to be taught does not make it any easier, given the socio-linguistic background of the majority of our students. As long ago as 1957 Richard Hoggart wrote in The Uses of Literacy "One of the most striking features of our present cultural situation is the division between the technical languages of the experts and the extraordinarily low level of the organs of mass communication." The self-important obscurantism and jargon adopted by government-inspired "initiatives", with "teaching packages" which are "delivered" by "providers" ought to put teachers on their guard: we must not fall into the same trap. Much is written in syllabuses and in text books which is clearly there not for students, but partly to impress government and partly (and much more insidiously) to achieve a subtle shift in the perceived function of school in society.

For the literacy debate may well polarise opinion amongst teachers along these lines. On the one hand there will be utilitarians who believe that the world exists apart from language, that language is a tool only, and that school must be about vocational training for the majority using the language of the marketplace. On the other hand there will be the individualists who believe that language creates the world, and that a mastery of it is the key to human freedom. In other words, does school accept society as it is and seek to serve it, or does it seek to re-make it? The answer might seem simple- who pays the piper calls the tune. But then, what price democracy? What price imagination and creativity?

So, in practical terms, at what level do we as a school want to develop a controversy? Controversy there will certainly be, even if we are content to deal with the demand for a literacy policy at the most superficial level- the hundred words commonly misspelled or mis-spelt, a vocabulary list for science, reading in registration on Tuesdays- the kind of policy which will satisfy the requirement but actually changes nothing of ultimate value. Because I for one see this debate as being not just another facet of "school improvement", but an opportunity to do something radical, something literate- something which will be, like any real literature, interpretative and critical: critical of what is actually going on (and not going on) at this school. And not just in class. It is an opportunity to reify that vague unease which accompanies staff discourse at meetings, or the hopelessness not far short of despair engendered by the language of school "documents", and do something about it. The harsh point being that we cannot expect to develop literacy amongst our students unless we are literate ourselves.

But is such a statement reasonable? Against what standard of literacy can we possibly measure ourselves? I own a book which my father used as a mature student in 1947: English Grammar, Composition and Correspondence by Pink and Thomas.

It is a complete guide in five hundred pages to a use of English which was, at that time, understood to be correct. A motto on the cover reads: Aut Optimum Aut Nihil- either the best or nothing. Fifty years on, the assumptions it makes about literacy and its function in society are breathtaking. It is not only that today we have nothing remotely comparable. The whole intellectual frame of reference has largely disappeared.

To which one might reply, so what? It has no relevance to the society in which our students live and in which they are shortly going to work as adults. How very true. The argument demands that I bore you with an attempt to summarise in a paragraph the shift in educational methodology since the war. Patience.

Pink and Thomas were able to assume that students would become literate by learning the English language and being exercised in its correct application. They saw this process as initiatory: once learned, English could be used, both in imaginative writing and everyday communication- they take their examples both from literature and from what we now call business applications. Under the influence of philosophers such as Foucault, who condemned schools for being like hospitals to cure children of the disease of childhood, the initiatory understanding of learning was replaced with the concept of learning as exploration- the "child-centred" approach in which instead of being told facts, methods, and the rules of society, the students are expected to discover their necessity for themselves.

I suspect that there is a growing body of opinion amongst teachers who were trained in the child-centred philosophy that it is fact an appalling waste of time. Why, the reactionary argument runs, should students spend hours and hours finding out the basics of a subject when they could be told them at an early stage in their schooling and therefore be equipped to tackle its really interesting, more advanced features?¹

We know why. 1947 also saw the publication of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, with its famous statement that "it is all up with the once blindingly valid conventions, which guaranteed the freedom of play." Quite so. But the character which speaks these words is the Devil. What evidence is there that the old conventions are finished with? What new literature has arisen which does not acknowledge them?

(This is something of a digression, but consider the fact that Joyce and Beckett, for all their avant-gardism, are steeped in the conventions of the western literary tradition; so are Bellow and Pynchon, Golding, Burgess, Byatt, Norfolk, pick your own favourites. Then turn to kind of thing offered by the "bestsellers", magazines and newspapers read in the homes from which many if not most of our students come. Here, leaving aside the lucrative wordspinning of clever cynics, we find writers not working within the tradition, or even against or in spite of it, but in total ignorance of it, glowing with self-congratulation because they have discovered something that anyone who had read anything worthwhile at all could have told them anyway. Popular writing now is so bad because it communicates nothing at all beyond the writer's own narrow worldview. It has nothing to say, because all it can do is to repeat contrived statements of ersatz emotion, or simply attempt to shock, or "thrill". It does, however, create a world of imaginary values within which the reader, being unaware of what he or she is missing, can feel at home. No effort is required- only acceptance. Those of us who cannot accept its meaningless posturings rage impotently.)

As if it were a parody of child-centred educational philosophy, the society created by the mass media has become child-centred. And the child in question is a particularly nasty, ill-bred specimen. Instant gratification is demanded: and the dogged pursuit of learning is regarded as being at best eccentric, at worst as intellectual snobbery. We teachers have to speak of our academic achievements in the same language of self-depreciation as children who are afraid of being called "swots"; what was once the product of humility is now enforced lest we appear arrogant. Serious debate is a social embarrassment: everything has to be "informal", meaning inadequately organised, or "simple", meaning shallow. The whole vast question of what a mature human being ought to be like- what it means to be an adult- is now taboo. The very word "adult" is now used adjectivally to describe a particularly infantile form of pornography. And in the midst of this deification of youth, we are supposed to run a school, which, pace Foucault, is still a place where children learn to become adults. But in the culture in which our students live, many young adults (including parents of current students) who left school ten or twenty years ago, still think and behave like children, in the sense that those qualities hitherto regarded as being characteristically adult- adherence to principle, parental responsibility, leadership, seriousmindedness, are regarded as quaint survivals from another age. And as for literacy- the word is meaningless. Who is responsible for this situation? The educational establishment? Themselves educated in the fifties and sixties in the shadow of the war, they were wary of authoritarianism, desperate to eradicate any suspicion of the totalitarian ideology which Europe had narrowly escaped only a few years previously. But that isn't it: they were only responding to a wider issue: the quite sudden disappearance of external validation.

Here is the crux of the problem. When I was at school (I know, but bear with me) we laboured under the motto Nisi Dominus Frustra. Except the Lord keep the house, the psalm goes, they labour but in vain that build it. If I was lazy or unco-operative, if I was rude to teachers or a bully to other students, if I failed in any way to live up to expectations, I understood the criticism I received: I was not just failing my teachers, I was failing the Lord. His expectations validated the teachers' expectations. I did not study in order to prepare myself for a career- that was a by product- I studied in order to know God and enjoy Him for ever, in the old Anglo-Catholic phrase.

Now, there is no external validation. There can't be. In our society, God is dead, or lives on only as a kind of folk superstition or simpering nostalgia. This is the ontological shift in consciousness which makes us authentically modern people. For us, there can be nothing outside human consciousness: we make it all up. All of it, including our own validations. We are a self-validating society. This is new, and we are still not very good at it. We are still trying to live as if there were some external justification for our actions. But to what can we appeal? Only to the memory of a once fully functioning religious moral structure which has now collapsed.

Fortunately for us, the self-absorbed ephemerism of yoof culture makes it unlikely to say the least that any of our students will have noticed this. But if they are ever able to find it out, we will lose our authority. We will cease to be educators completely, and be unable to do more than instruct students in carrying out basic operations which they can already see to be relevant to the role they expect to play in society. Who pays the piper calls the tune. If our students are lazy and unco-operative, the only sanction we have now is to warn them that they will not be able to have a very good career if they are unqualified. If they are rude or aggressive, we can only say that society cannot tolerate such behaviour. We rely utterly on the residual moral sense which all but the mentally maladjusted still retain in order for the school to function socially, let alone academically- that and sheer force of personality. But for how much longer can we keep it up?

We urgently need something that will validate our adult demands on children. How are we going to validate this new emphasis on literacy? The only validation so far is the idea that it will improve the school. Beating our breasts once again, we admit that, yes Minister, we are failing, we could Do Better, we will have a literacy policy in place by the year 2000.² But while this kind of validation by educational authority might work for teachers, it isn't going to make any difference at all to the students who will ask why it matters. They'll still be told it's a careers issue. It might even do damage to the already fragile teaching relationship, by making us look foolish. If literacy is this important, they might ask, why haven't you done something about it already? Did you have to be told how important it is? Didn't you know?

The search for a real validation- one which works for the students too- might begin by looking at what was actually going on in those communities in the past which were functionally literate, and then doing the same thing- but in a completely modern way: and that means in a completely demythologised way. Things, as they say, have changed since I was at school. And the biggest change is that there is no longer any "outside" to human consciousness. Now, literacy isn't something Out There which we can instruct people in, it's something In Here which we make in response to our linguistic environment. This is the point. Pink and Thomas's book is mythic, realist. It believes in a really existing, tangible, correct literacy. It reifies it, pins it down, shows exactly how it works, gives its students a standard against which to measure themselves. In this way it reflects perfectly the approach to literacy implied in the naming of the old grammar schools, right back to their origins in the middle ages, and to some extent helps preserve the last faint echo of their worldview. So what is a demythologised grammar school worldview? What, in fact, is a truly modern, functional literacy like?

The grammar school view of literacy, derived as it was from the centrality of Holy Writ, took it for granted that language could be used to describe things external to itself. Theological discourse saw no contradiction between its description of God's purposes as unknowable and its interminable explanations of them. Since Wittgenstein, let alone the deconstructionists, language has been understood to be reflexive in this sense: it can only say the kind of things that language can say.³ So it has no outside. And because it has no outside, there is no point of vantage from which we can survey it as a whole. This is why there is nothing comparable to Pink and Thomas today, there can't be. But if there is no correct version of English, or any way of teaching it as a complete tool for communication, does anything go? Are there no longer rules which students should learn? Iv eye rite lyke this, duz it marrer?

I think it does matter. It matters because, to take the present example of writing-as-communication, I could not have got anywhere near expressing my feelings about literacy without a fairly good grasp of standard English. More significantly, I would not have been able to develop my thoughts, through the act of writing. In a sense the thoughts are the writing. The development of a literacy policy has to do with the quality of thought of which our students might be capable.

This is why a simple spelling, grammar and vocabulary approach alone won't do. What students need is to be shown the intrinsic value of literacy: how beneficial it is in its own right, never mind the demands of the curriculum. Tell the students why they are doing something, why it really matters, and they'll do it. Look how well they respond to being told that careers matter: how they swell up with honest pride because we're taking them seriously as potential members of adult society. Literacy is- heresy, oh, heresy- more important to us than careers advice: how well they'd respond if we could put that to them! Of course, it helps if we believe it ourselves. I wonder how many of us do. The implication here is again potentially divisive and difficult, having to do with the balance of the curriculum and the status of subject areas. ICT stands for Information and Communication Technology . I am using information technology now to communicate with you. Is this what goes on in ICT classes?

Students need to experience the change of consciousness that quality writing can effect. So they have to read. This means that they need to read not because they've been told to as part of some theory of school improvement, but because we as teachers are passionate about reading and they want to get this great buzz too. Can we hope for this? Teachers' enthusiasm for reading rubbing off on students? How often have you seen a teacher carrying a book around with them because at that time it is the most precious thing in their lives? All we have at the moment is the travesty of the Book Fair or Fayre, whose rationale seems to be that so long as it's printed, and doesn't insult the children by suggesting that there are things in the world that they haven't heard of yet it's all right. No it isn't. Much of what is on offer is mass media derived rubbish. Publishers cannot be relied on to give students worthwhile, literate literature. Only to make money. And who can blame them? Can we please stop pretending that publishers' book fairs have anything to do with improving literacy?

Students need to realise that through writing they can change the world they live in by giving it value, by criticising it, challenging it, developing their thought, growing up into adults. Which is what literature has always been for. So they must be shown how adults read. Voraciously. Because it matters. Because the world in which we live has been formed by the writing of the past and continues to be formed by every thought which truly communicates. Because of sheer joy in the skill of great writers. Because of the power of beautiful language. You know the kind of thing. I don't need to sell great literature. As a teacher, I need to live it. So I direct plays by Shakespeare or Lorca or Euripides. So I write a play which stages the unstageable masterpiece of Goethe. I make them read Beckett and invent and act out in front of an audience their own response. They do it because it matters to me. Something must rub off. I have to offer something to show that there is an alternative to the pap of pop, to the narcissistic, empty rhetoric of the rock lyric beloved of yoof, which far from changing the world as it is, lives in a symbiotic or parasitic relationship with it, spitting in the face of adult culture, blaming it for all its frustration, yet entirely dependent on it for its dissemination. Rattling the bars of its cage in autoerotic fury, yoof forgets that it made the cage itself. Liberation is there for the asking. It is called literacy. Non nobis, Domine.

I am not optimistic. If a modern literacy policy for the school is dependent on a genuine enthusiasm for reading and writing amongst the staff, we will not achieve it. This is a hard fact. For to be literate is to be a practitioner. And reading is difficult, writing more so. I predict that we will go on as we are, stumbling from one new "initiative" to another, producing page after page of "documents", having endless meetings about administration and logistics, feeling guilty that we can never quite get our rotten teeth around the dangling carrot of official approval. It won't be long before we are asked to comment on proposals for the new School Mission Statement.

¹ For a fascinating fictionalised account of this debate, see A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower.

² Notice how the old religious forms just won't go away- here we have confession/penitence/absolution. I recently heard an assembly in which the pattern of work and examinations in year 11 was described in purely secular terms, but with exactly the same mythic structure as that which describes the sinner's preparation for Judgement Day.

³ See, for a relevant discussion, Keightley, Wittgenstein, Grammar, and God. (1976)

Back to education page