Governing Literate Populations: The Political Uses of Literacy in Securing Civil Society

Abstract

This study researches the way that forms of government deploy literacy when imagining a secure and civil society. As such it is a study that investigates govs ernmental reasoning in its uses of literacy. The study examines arguments made by governments and policy makers about the uses of literacy education and how it can be of benefit to the nation and to individual citizens. Conversely, I also evaluate claims made about the effects of illiteracy or literacy practices not consistent with mainstream social norms and which, from various standpoints, pose risks to national security. While this research focuses principally on the Australian context, I consider how political stances in organisations like the OECD and the United Nations influence and qualify the Australian situation. Here, I scope a relationship between literacy, education and security in Australian political life, and seek to trace how these terms have been understood, applied, developed and intersected in Australian and international contexts. This book seeks to better understand those forces that connect wider political purposes into seemingly straightforward discourses about our capabilities as literate citizens. I understand the processes discussed above as discursive practices, in which the use of terms like literacy and security play a key role in the proposal of policies and their representation by government. As someone who has worked in the field of literacy education this research need be considered as a discursive practice. In my work, I have taken up the responsibility for processes of policy development and dissemination, as well as professional development connected to such policies. I am acutely aware of the weight that such message systems carry: that discourses of policy have the capacity to speak through me and to speak me. I am also aware that the messages that I disseminate to those that I teach can have material effects. In my work, I am expected to constitute myself as an ethical and moral subject. This process of self-government necessitates a form of self-censure or delimitation that involves the need to be selective about what I speak and how I speak.