Literacy education: "About being in the world"

Abstract

Over about 4,000 years, the teaching of reading and writing has been recruited into contrasting, even contradictory agendas. These agendas, from the mundane to the sublime, are all readily recognizable today. Historical accounts (e.g. Fischer 2001, Thomas 2009) show us literacy education in the service of managing debts and credits; inculcating novices into sects and elites; maintaining threatened cultural and linguistic heritages; enforcing the standardization of those heritages in the "building" of nations; providing a trained, trainable citizenry in times of rapid change; provoking, legitimizing, and channelling intergroup distrust; preparing citizens for willing engagement in autocracy, democracy, and revolution - in short, in the service of control and liberation, knowledge and mystification, solidarity and discord. Historians show us literacy accelerating and inhibiting large and small transformations of personal, domestic, community, civil, and vocational life, from prehistory to now (Kaestle and Radway 2009, McKitterick 1990). The scale and depth of these transformations has been such that they have sometimes been misread as being directly and solely caused by developments in literacy technologies (Graff 2010). However, there is a contradiction in how the provision of literacy education is publicly regarded: it is presented to the young and to non, or semi,literate communities as both an entitlement and a requirement, providing individuals and collectives with the means and the agency to participate in public life, but also insistently establishing the means of their governability (Smith 1999). This tension in the experience of teaching and learning to read and write - agency and govern ability - forms a thread through the following discussion.