Debating literacy in Australia: history lessons and popular f(r)ictions.

Green, Bill ; Hodgens, John ; Luke, Allan 等

Snapshots Illiteracy is not only a cruel and unjust handicap, from the point of view of the individual, but a disgrace, and indeed a menace, from the point of view of society. The Duncan Report [Adult Education in Australia], 1944, p. 106.

Delinquents are rare in Christian homes. Argus, 10 May 1954, p. 5.

Illiteracy is the great Australian disease... The Australian, 8 August 1976, p. 3.

Australia's ability to compete internationally will remain seriously impeded while one in seven workers cannot read and write well enough to improve their skills ... Upgrading literacy skills in Australian workplaces is crucial to improved productivity. John Dawkins, media release, Department of Employment, Education and Training, 30 July 1990, p. 1.

Literacy was not a major issue in Australia before preparations for International Literacy Year (ILY) began in 1989. Noel Simpson, Preface, Putting Literacy on the Agenda (Canberra: DEET, 1992), p. iv.

[T]he real issue facing our schools is the teaching of functional literacy -- the ability to read and write usefully -- on a much higher level for the whole population that has been required in history., P.P. McGuinness, 'Grammar Crucial to Unlocking Language', The Weekend Australian, 3 July 1994, p. 2.

Literacy challenges

The axiom that those who fail to understand history are bound to repeat it is rarely more relevant than in the case of public debates over literacy. Teachers' work by definition concentrates on the resent. But because teaching and teacher education are characteristically defined in terms of finding the 'state of the art' -- the, latest, most scientific approaches -- it is all too easy to neglect understanding of historical contexts and influences, particularly those of the recent and immediate past.

Controversy over literacy has become a permanent fixture of educational debate and policy. With the release of a recent federal parliamentary report entitled 'The Literacy Challenge', one front-page headline read: 'Flaws in child literacy' (The Age, 2 February 1993, p. 1). Another newspaper account, more soberly headlined 'Report calls to boost to literacy study' (the Australian, 6-7 February 1993, p. 43), argued that primary school children and teacher education alike were seriously and significantly deficient in regard to training and exercise of 'literacy skills'. Other articles followed: the Age published feature articles by Margaret Easterbrook ('Primary schools failing students, report finds', 9 February 1993) and Michael Barnard ('Literacy campaign fails the written test', 1 January 1993, p. 13). The Weekend Australian followed this m turn with a feature article by Christopher Bantick, a freelance writer and educational consultant who is also Head of English at a Melbourne private school. The article was headlined more dramatically, 'Burnt by the fire of new language" but its subtitle was familiar: 'Disturbing decline in literacy skills in Australian schoolchildren' (February 13-14 1993, p. 46). Both of these newspapers have become significant players in recent and current literacy and educational debates.

The release in December 1990 of a Green Paper, entitled The Language of Australia: Discussion Paper on an Australian Literacy and Language Policy for the 1990s, followed in August 1991 by a White Paper under the title Australia's Language: The Australian Language and Literacy Policy, culminated a period of intense debate over literacy and related issues. It marked a historic moment: the explicit naming of literacy' as an object of policy, at the federal level. There is certainly reason to welcome such an initiative, given the possibility of nationally co-ordinated emphasis on literacy pedagogy and related forms of educational provision and funding. But this cannot be taken for granted as a matter simply of `enlightened' governmental intervention. Given the Predominantly economic-rationalist, 'human capital' orientation of recent governmental policy, the move to secure a stronger link between literacy and the state represents a more general strategy of bringing education within the ambit of the state and its organised forms of governmentality. It is impossible to impose clear demarcations, for instance, between recent literacy policy and national curriculum initiatives, or school retention debates and post-compulsory schooling policy. Similarly, when policy links education with employment and training, technology and economic development, cultural and linguistic diversity, and issues of gender, these are clearly contextual frames for understanding why language and literacy have become explicit and formal objects of policy and governmental concern.

How are teachers and teacher educators to meet the challenges raised by such debates? Typically, public 'outbreaks' of literacy crisis in public continue -- with 'responses' by teachers' unions, professional organisations and academics. Debates then tend to 'die down' after a flurry of reports on other media and public response on radio talk-back and letters to the editor. But the effect is powerful, and the damage has been done: conventional wisdom is reconstructed under the assumption that there is a literacy 'problem', and that responsibility lies squarely with educational systems and educators.

As illustrated in the examples above, much of the literacy debate requires and tuns upon a loss of memory; a public and (often) professional amnesia. It depends on the capacity of journalists, politicians and public figures, educators and 'experts' themselves to recycle the same claims, the same images, year in and year out. If such claims are repeated and restated sufficiently, they become part of public commonsense, part of the 'way things are'. To meet these challenges, educators require informed and constructive strategies. An important first step for all teachers and teacher educators, journalists and politicians therefore would be to become more familiar with the recent history of public debates over literacy and schooling.

The documentary history: An overview

In June 1994 we submitted a two-volume research report on literacy debates in Australia to the Australian Literacy Federation (ALF), which had funded the enquiry (Green, Hodgens & Luke, 1994). The project was described as 'a documentary history of contemporary literacy debates', and we argued that the then current 'clever country' debate over policy directions, and the vociferous educational debate over the best method', lacked broader historical perspectives on the relationship between literacy crises and larger economic, social and political contexts. While various studies in the area were available (e.g. Freebody & Welch [eds],1993a), an overview of recent Australian history in this regard had yet to be undertaken. As a result, much current educational debate occurs in the absence of historical evidence of the recent past, and instead is based on anecdote, recollection and polemic. The aim of the ALF project, accordingly, was to illuminate something of this broader historical and cultural picture, with particular reference to the period 1945-90. The report is now available for cited use by researchers and teachers, in hard-copy and on disk, from the ALF office. It consists of over 190 documents, with framing commentaries and brief guidelines for policy and pedagogy.

Our aim in researching and compiling this documentary history was to provide teachers, education students' teacher educators and researchers with an archival resource for talking about, on the one hand, the relationships between literacy and schooling and, on the other, broader cultural, economic and social change. The report is therefore a picture of literacy as the form of public, political and media debate from the end of the Second World War to the benchmark release of the Language of Australia statement by the Department of Employment, Education and Training, and beyond. The period covered spans from 1945 to the early 1990s.

Over 22 months in 1992-94 we collected approximately 600 documents from national, state and university archives and libraries in four states and the Australian Capital Territory. The activity consisted of extended detective work' of finding clues, checking and rechecking sources, and trying to account for missing' periods and issues. Although our emphasis was on newspaper articles, we also collected magazine articles, ministerial press releases, legislation, passages from Hansard, government minutes and correspondence, inspectors' reports, teachers' guidelines and educational literature.

Our search initially focussed on the topics of literacy, reading and writing in education. We soon found, however, that there were periods where literacy education was not discussed or even 'named' in public debate; and that literacy education could not be taken up as an issue without description of other 'adjacent' developments in education, culture, economics and politics. We thus had to deal with two key problems of methodology. First, we had to describe `absence': that is, to see and explain why 'literacy' and 'education' were not perceived or reported to be key issues in a particular period, and, more generally, what was 'unsaid' in newspapers and other public forums. Second, we had to describe what we called 'adjacent fields': that is, to explain and document how literacy and education are interconnected, or articulated, with other issues, trends and formations.

In researching a documentary history of literacy debates in Australia in the post-war period, our work was informed from the outset by two hypotheses: firstly, that any such history is best conceived and conducted as a 'history of the present', in Michel Foucault's phrase; and secondly, that 'literacy 'must be understood, over and above its commonsense meaning, as an `alibi' or metaphor for something else. The first hypothesis turns upon our conviction that a project such as this, commissioned in the circumstances and manner it has been, is not simply of 'historical' -- that is, archival -- interest. Rather, it is intended to have an impact upon present political and pedagogical debates vis-a-vis language and literacy policy in Australia. A history such as this above all 'serves the concerns of the present': 'Writing a history of the present means writing a history in the present; self-consciously writing in a field of power relations and political struggles' (Roth, 1981: p. 43).(1) That hypothesis has accordingly guided our research work, and we are continuing to explore its implications.

Our second hypothesis is that 'literacy' is to be understood as something of a codeword, as a term standing in for, or representing, something else and other than simply either capacity associated with writing language usage, or the relationship between such usage and school learning. This hypothesis is clearly linked to the first, since it is informed by a critical sense of literacy, education and history. As one American commentator writes recently, under the heading 'On not taking literacy literally':

Over the last decade or so, illiteracy has gained a great deal of public attention. From reading the newspaper stories and commission reports, one would think the industrialized nations had been struck with a sudden outbreak of illiteracy, and the developing nations with a sudden realization of literacy's role in economic development. But ought these dual recent discoveries' be taken at face value? [...] Perhaps there is more to the story. (Bromley, 1989: p. 124).

Indeed. What then might be added to the story told so far in Australia, and by whom? What other stories are possible and, particularly from the points of view of literacy workers, desirable?

We originally sought to answer these questions by organising the documentary items into five broad chronological periods, representing major shifts in cultural and educational direction. The period following the release of the White Paper has continued to see outbreaks of public debate on literacy and related issues, and so we added a brief selection of documents illustrating something of how this is being manifested.

Period 1: Stability and Threat, 1945-1956

Period 2: Sputnik and Technological Challenge, 1957-1965

Period 3: Culture Wars, 1966-1972

Period 4: Backlash and Reaction, 1973-1983

Period 5: Accounting for Literacy, 1983-1991

Period 6: After the White Paper: A New Era?

Our aim has been to show how literacy debates are fundamentally a contest of social visions and ideologies. The documentary history is about how public debates over literacy and education have been used to promote different versions of appropriate behaviour, and different visions of the ideal literate student and citizen. It attempts For a succinct Australian account of this orientation to historical work, see Tyler and Johnson (1991). to describe the diverse and competing images of the literate and illiterate, and of the causes and consequences of literacy and illiteracy, and offers an account of how and why `literacy' came to matter in Australian cultural and political Life. We will now discuss some of the implications and findings from the research, and suggest how it continues to inform our work on literacy formations and educational politics.

Debates, definitions, dilemmas and demons

People have not always talked about literacy as `literacy'. Our research very quickly showed that the `literacy debate' per se is a relatively recently phenomenon in Australia, at least in the form that is most recognisable today.(2) Interestingly, the use of the terms `literacy' and `illiteracy' rarely occur in the Australian press until the early 1970s. Reference to `reading' and `writing' or even `proper English' does occur, though not frequently, as marking problems in schooling. This means that our guiding questions, then, became:

* When and why did literacy become a key term in public debates over schooling and culture?

* What is its relationship to more general claims about the English language?

* how did it become connected with issues such as censorship and morality, standards, nationalism, technology and economic productivity?

It is worth asking what is at issue in `literacy debates', then, if it isn't literacy as such? What is really at issue? Furthermore what is literacy? Across these documents we find it referred to as `skill', `competence', `morality', `tradition', `heritage', `knowledge' and so forth. What is significant is that all of these terms are open sets for contemporary social and cultural norms and values. The picture that emerges is that of `literacy' as a continually contested and unfinished concept, an empty canvas upon which anxieties and aspirations from the popular imagination and public morality are drawn.

Everybody is an expert on literacy: parents, teachers, politicians, journalists and media `experts' and, of course, students themselves. Experience of literacy education appears to be something everybody has in common. In public forums, from talk-back radio shows to school parent meetings, anecdotes about `how it was when I was in school' become the basis for debate and conflict. This should hardly be surprising, since Western educational systems legally require 8-10 years of everyone's daily life. Literacy education is therefore an important cultural touchstone: a point of shared cultural practice and experience.

But people have dramatically different memories of becoming literate. Depending on the time and place of their schooling, these range across innumerable versions of the 3Rs, to grammar school literacy, from religious training to bilingual education, from phonics teaching to creative writing instruction, from corporal punishment and rote learning to open classrooms and negotiated curriculum. These remembrances of literacy past, filtered through years of life history and experience, are easily turned into claims about how reading and writing should be taught, and about what teachers and schools should do.

Reliance on personal memory and local experience is part of what makes debating and discussing what we should be doing with literacy education so difficult. For what at first glance appears to be a cultural touchstone, and a shared experience, turns out to be a collection of diverse and conflicting experiences. Mass schooling from its inception indicates how the unequal distribution of kinds and levels of literate practice and skill are used to include and exclude students from life chances and outcomes.

Literacy education, then, always has been about difference and power, about teaching members of communities and nations to `be' different kinds of literate citizens, with stratified access to social institutions. Rather than literacy education being a common cultural experience, the different kinds of literacies provided for communities of learners tend to reflect, rather than erase, Australian social class difference and cultural diversity.

Furthermore, in interesting contrast, while the terms `illiteracy' and `literacy' have only become common in media and political educational debate in Australia in the last two decades, they have been common in American, British and Canadian educational debates at least since the First World War. Why was Australia different in this respect, and why and how has literacy become a central focus of the last ten years of educational funding and policy?

In the first place, it is only over the last 30 years or so that Australians have had to contend with large-scale shifts in social, cultural and economic realms. These include at least four closely interrelated elements of change.

* A shift from relative geographic and communications isolation to participation in globalised culture and multinational economic relations via `fast capitalist' media, transportations infrastructure, telecommunications, and computer technology.

* An intergenerational shift from traditional British cultural and political orientations to those affiliated with the USA, Asia and other Pacific Rim countries.

* A shift from a resource and agriculture-based economy with protected, traditional markets to a multinational, corporateDAconomy that increasingly is required to compete for global markets and resources across a range of primary, manufacturing, service and information sectors.

* The emergence of an overtly multicultural, multilingual population as the result of successive waves of post-war immigration, recognition of Aboriginal citizenship and entitlements, and the move away from assimilationist social policy.

The question of why and how literacy became a public issue requires an analysis of larger political, cultural and economic issues and forces. No one would doubt that literacy and schooling have parts to play in the making of Australian institutions, politics and everyday life. The period studied here marked the expansion of both private and public Australian educational systems to accommodate the post-war `baby boom' generation, migrants, and newly enfranchised Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. The rapid expansion of state schooling from the late 1950s, and of tertiary education from the mid to the late 1960s, brought about new educational agendas and tensions. Hence, from the 1970s on, debates over the international competitiveness of schools, colleges and universities; universal access and equity in educational funding; and inclusive, economically useful and socially relevant curricula have all been placed on the public agenda.

The links between literacy and socioeconomic practice are complex, and literacy is not the primary factor effecting change. Unfortunately, this is precisely the assumption at work in the literacy debate: that somehow illiteracy causes social upheaval, and cultural and economic decline, and that literacy can solve a range of social problems, from delinquency to immorality, to crime, to unemployment. In this way, literacy acts as a smokescreen for debate over larger social, cultural and economic issues. One of the central lessons of this history, then, is that it is impossible to study or discuss literacy as an isolated phenomenon: literacy always acts as a `codeword' for other concerns and anxieties in public debate.

A `codeword'?

To see this process in action, we turn to a key editorial in the Australian, `Losing our romance with [the] printed word', published on 13 June 1987, which we shall re-present at some length. It began with the following words: This week we have seen the conclusion of two separate trials for two of the most brutal and disturbing crimes in Australia's history, the rape and murder of Mrs Anita Cobby and the multiple murders which occurred in the Milperra massacre when rival bikie gangs confronted each other in the car park of a suburban hotel.

Australia is not alone in suffering incidents of this kind. The whole world was horrified by the. Yorkshire Ripper murders in Britain a few years ago, while America is still pondering the senseless killing of a black youth in New York's Howard Beach district.

The article went on to note `a thread connecting these disparate acts of carnage beyond merely the gross violence which they involve', describing this as `the poverty, the emptiness of the culture in which the perpetrators of these crimes live'.

At the heart of this poverty of popular culture is the decline of the printed word. Nowadays, when every young school child is exposed to a computer, when school-age children spend almost as many hours in front of the television set as at school, when arithmetic has been almost abolished in favour of calculators and when thousands of children spend countless hours amusing themselves in front of video games generally simulating death and destruction, the romance of the written word has been overwhelmed by the instant gratification offered by the video screen.

Film director Steven Spielberg (`master of the special effects potential of the visual medium') is cited as `recently flagg[ing] the danger our societies face when they ignore or demean the written word', and he is described as `call[ing] on us to "renew our romance with the word"'.

The romance of the word: this perhaps above all else has been the chief casualty of the technological revolution in popular culture, a headlong rush away from the written word and towards much less demanding, much less fulfilling and ultimately much less civilizing forms of communication and entertainment.

In a classic expression of the discourse of `cultural literacy', the article went on to set literature against television, reading against viewing, and the new forms of communication against received forms of culture and morality, as well as to make an explicit connection between literature and literacy. Central to its argument and polemic was a conviction of `the civilising effects of words on character'.

[W]ithout the appreciation of the written word, without the ability to lose themselves in a novel, or be thrilled and stimulated by the powerful language of poetry or the lucidity and eloquence of a sustained essay, without the access to a detailed study of history, young people are cut off from their own inheritance and deprived of the civilising effects of words on character.

The article concluded in this fashion:

The eclipse of the written word is the eclipse of sensibility in our society. The more we demean the essential importance of literature in all its forms the more we impoverish and harden our community, and deprive it of the intellectual and spiritual sustenance it so obviously needs.

This editorial links literacy with a constellation of broader issues and concerns. It begins with references to rape and murder, connecting these with the `poverty of popular culture' and the `decline of the printed word'. This kind of expansion of literacy into issues of `social concern' is typical of media reports. We are led to believe that violent criminal acts are the result of a decline in literacy. This decline is caused by the advent of `less civilising forms of communication and entertainment' including television, video games and computers. It is also caused by the entry of women into the professional workforce, and by the decline of those institutions that `traditionally taught people a certain code of morality'. So the image of the `illiterate' here is that of the criminal, improperly reared by working women, and crazed by exposure to barbaric forms of technological, popular culture.

The overall situation is described as nothing less than the `poverty of...contemporary culture' and the `decline' of family, church and school. The answers for immorality, `purposelessness', unemployment and `other social ills' lay in a return to `the essential importance of literature'. Throughout, the article calls in experts of no less stature than Steven Spielberg, John Howard, and G.K. Chesterton. The image of the `literate' here is one of the (male?) novel-reading, civilised sensibility, who follows a `certain code of morality' and, no doubt, believes that women should be kept in the home to raise children, and that Rudyard Kipling's Kim beats any documentary or mini-series in the provision of `mysterious thrill[s]' any day.

What we can ask about such texts is: whose interests and values are served by this particular version of literacy and illiteracy? Our point here is that the literacy debate is rarely about `literacy' in itself. It is tied up with larger political and moral debates about the directions of communities and cultures, nation-states and economies. Here literacy implies a political stance related to anti-feminist `backlash', Anglo/British monoculturalism, and so forth. Illiteracy is associated directly with criminality, immorality, mass media, technology, women's right to work. So, in this case, literacy is neither the real issue, problem or answer.

Above all, then, media reports on literacy need to be recognised as ideological claims which extend into a range of `public concerns'. They provide very powerful discourse strategies for justifying or extending the differential distribution of material and symbolic resources. As Garth Boomer (1980: p. 23) wrote well over a decade ago, in a special issue on `Standards of Literacy' of the Australian Journal of Reading: `Literacy debates are almost always defined and diagnosed downwards. Very rarely does a less powerful or less prestigious community group accuse a superior section of the community of being illiterate.' In this way these debates are acts of power, whereby the population is defined in terms of the kinds of knowledge and competence seen as requisite for and consequential of literacy.

In a speech to a forum organised by the then very new Australian Literacy Federation on 8 March 1991, John Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training, had this to say: `We need not apologise for linking literacy and language development to this country's economic future as well as to its social, educational and cultural well being. The development of long-term skills and capacities in individuals assist[s] not only their own personal growth, but also that of the nation's productivity as well.' In the context of the Green and White Papers, then, economic matters are clearly marked out as a primary consideration for thinking about literacy. As the historical record shows, this is a recurrent theme of the public `debate' on literacy and schooling, making up a significant strand as it gathered in momentum from the early 1970s on.

How are teachers, administrators and parents to respond to such claims? As the archive shows, the statistical data cited from surveys and tests typically is poorly detailed and often not documented at all, calling into doubt polemical claims and interpretations. Consider these claims from a four-year period in the 1970s.

High school illiteracy...Two of the three Rs are forgotten...and 30,000 pupils suffer.

Sunday Telegraph, 17 March 1974, p. 43.

More than fifteen per cent of students who leave high school cannot read or write well enough to communicate in the most fundamental way.

The Australian, 3 March 1975, p. 3.

... in an average Australian community, there are probably more than ten percent of adults who cannot read, and up to 15 per cent of children who have serious reading difficulties.

Northern Territory News, 14 October 1976, p. 15.

More than 225,000 people in NSW cannot read or write as well as a 10-year-old. Eight percent of juvenile offenders in Victorian gaols are incompetent in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Australian Women's Weekly, 24 September 1977, p. 16.

Often the stringing together of statistical claims is at best speculative, if not deliberately misleading. For instance, if we create a composite of figures from claims in the mid-1970s, near half of the Australian population, adult and child, male and female, would be `illiterate', or, to pick up on some of the dominant metaphors of the time, 'retarded' or even 'diseased'.(3)

But even in the rare instance where data cited might be reliable and accurately reported, the claim of declining standards is both impossible to establish and impossible to refute, for the simple reason that reading and writing are not static and unchanging. They are dynamic social practices, which change over time in accordance with particular cultural and social contexts. Consider, for example, a straightforward comparison of how well students 'wrote' or 'read' between 1953 and 1993. A number of factors would have to be considered.

* The student population of Australian schools has changed radically such that the typical student in 1953 in, for instance, Grade 5, would hardly be directly comparable with the student of 1993 in cultural, demographic, social, and, quite likely, linguistic background.

* 'Reading' and 'writing' themselves as valued community and workplace practices have changed and developed. The emergence of urban popular culture and the globalisation of Australian culture have meant that different kinds of reading and writing are valued in everyday life. In the changing economy some kinds of jobs have disappeared, and others, aligned with service industries, have come to the fore. So some demands for literacy where it is used in particular, occupational ways have evolved and others have disappeared.

* School instruction and curriculum have developed to reflect and foreshadow such changes. While the 1950s curriculum might have emphasised literary study, handwriting and spelling, current curriculum has widened its net to cover such areas as computer and basic keyboard skills, writing and reading a range of functional, occupational and academic text types, and media study. The demands on curriculum from community, employers and political groups continue to widen and expand.

But there are still many 'imagined' characteristics of literacy conveyed in media reporting. What happens is that, by sheer repetition, the literacy debate strings together claims: (1) that standards and practices of literacy are falling; (2) that these declines are a definitive cause of wider social, economic and cultural 'ills'; and (3) that schools and teachers are directly or indirectly responsible for these declines.(4)

Such simple claims that standards and practices of literacy have 'declined' are unfair and/or illogical. Even apparently straight-forward comparisons of school achievement on standardised tests over shorter periods of time need to consider a range of historical, contextual and population variables. This is to say nothing of questions about the accuracy and efficacy of test instruments, examination results and other measures. Here, it becomes imperative for work in curriculum and literacy -- including research and policy development for teaching and teacher education -- to have a good grasp of the larger historical and social field. Work of this kind needs therefore to be interdisciplinary, as much as possible. In this present case, it means looking to such adjacent fields as migration and multiculturalism, youth studies and related policy, nationalism debates, political crises such as the Cold War and particular events such as the Melbourne Olympics, the Beatles' visit to Australia in 1964 or the visit of LBJ in 1966, and the Vietnam War. Most importantly, developments in communications and technology policy are extremely relevant, as Australia moves into a new era of telecommunications. Due consideration must also be made of the effects of globalisation on Australian culture and society, along with past and current shifts in geo-political alignment and alliance.

To pursue the matter adequately clearly requires a broad grasp of historical themes and trends impacting on literacy debates. Our work suggests that while English-language teaching programs featured heavily in post-war migration policy and practice (Jupp, 1991: pp. 72-3), more debate is organised around notions of culture' and 'values', along with work-related and citizenship 'skills', than it is around language and literacy as such. Language and literacy issues have only recently been foregrounded as problematical matters in and of themselves. What is currently and commonly understood as 'literacy', then, is inextricably associated with specific notions of 'culture', 'values' and 'skills'. Hence evidence of debates over 'literacy', as understood in 'the present', might well t6 be found in historical references to conflict and concern over matters such as migration and multiculturalism debates. Already there are several themes emerging from the work to date, with a bearing on contemporary literacy debates and politics in Australia. The first concerns the 'Americanisation' of Australian culture and identity. Evidence indicates a gradual but inexorable shift of allegiance, both culturally and economically, from Britain and the Commonwealth towards the United States. For instance, in the latter stages of the Second World War, there was a concerted effort to increase the representation of American affairs in the Australian Broadcasting Commission, leading in turn to a series of exchanges through The ABC Weekly over the fate and fortunes of Australian speech (Pyvis, 1993). Subsequent debates expressed concern and sometimes agitation about the threat posed by comics, popular films and television, and broadly by popular culture. Significantly, this would seem often to be represented as a distinctively 'American' influence, although clearly it becomes more and more a matter of the globalisation of mass popular culture in the post-1960s period.

These factors connect to the second of our major emergent themes. The conflict between popular culture' and 'high culture' has clearly become central to recent literacy debates, manifesting itself in moral panics over television (and more recently video and computer games) and the threatened demise of literary culture and what has been presented as a 'romance of the written word'. Although historically this conflict was represented (for good or for bad) as a distinctively American influence, more recently there have been signs that Australia is shifting its investments and commitments once again, this time towards the Asia-Pacific region.(5) How this will manifest itself in struggles and debates over language and literacy is as yet obviously unclear. How what we have described as the 'Americanisation' of Australian culture and identity in the post-war period links up with what has been described as 'the global popular' (During, 1992), and also current moves towards an Asia-Pacific alignment, is a matter for further consideration, specifically with regard to how it manifests itself in the historical record and impacts on contemporary literacy debates and politics in Australia.

(Re)constructing the literate subject

The history we have presented cannot describe in any definitive way levels of literacy or actual schooling practices and outcomes. What it does show us, however, is how the public debate has constructed different kinds of the 'ideal' or desirable literate person: the literate subject. Here it is worth noting that the versions of the literate person foregrounded in public documents are not identical to those affiliated with dominant teaching models (e.g. skills', 'process', 'personal growth', 'genre', 'critical literacy') (Luke, 1995). In this history, four overlapping versions of the 'literate' emerge. All are still with us today, in the various ambit claims made by educators, politicians and reporters.

* 1950s: The moral subject The ideal literate person was seen to be the product of traditional literacy discipline and speech training. The maintenance of traditional standards and practices was seen as essential to combat the negative effects of popular culture, left-wing ideologies, and American cultural influence. This was an elite literacy. With low secondary retention rates and restricted tertiary participation, issues of difference and diversity did not figure prominently in any educational project. Significantly, the few debates in the early and mid-1950s over educational curriculum centred on the censorship of literary and moral content, not on instructional methods.

* 1960s: The technical/skilled subject The emphasis in the 1960s shifted towards the production of scientific expertise and skills for global geopolitical, military and technological competition. Fuelled by an increasing influence of American educational expertise and perspectives, there was an emergent debate over the adequacy of traditional 'literary' education to take up these challenges. While literacy remained a 'silent' issue until the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period led to a consolidation of American cultural and educational influences. Notably, the educational debates during this period centred on funding, the provision of adequate resources for an expanding system, and the implementation of modem, scientific methods of instruction, not on moral content.

* 1970s: The deficit/disadvantaged subject By the end of the decade, the anti-war and student movements had articulated powerful critiques of both traditional and technocratic cultures. Yet the alternative educational philosophies forwarded in the student press and some of the educational literature - progressivism, open education', and other models - barely rated a mention in the mainstream press. Issues of access and equality', however, had a powerful effect of reshaping the view of literacy and the literate. By the time post-war baby boomers and migrants' children had reached educational maturity', employers, educators and others were confronted with a volume of new clientele, for which they had little prior experience or training. The response of government throughout the 1970s was to seek to expand educational access and provision to migrants, Aborigines, adults and others under the auspices of social equity policies. It was during this period, then, that literacy and illiteracy become front-page news, with near hysteria about the social, medical and cultural consequences of illiteracy, which was almost always framed up in terms of individual deficit and social disadvantage. Educators increasingly looked towards psychological, diagnostic approaches to 'remediating' the deficit student.

* 1980s: The economic subject The globalisation and deregulation of the Australian economy led to a shift in both the goals and the processes of educational policy. While retaining some emphasis social justice and equity, I economic rationalism' in education has stressed the measurable production of 'human capital'. The aim became production of productive workers, skilled in new technologies and adapted to a flexible, post-Fordist economy. Most recently, this has led to literacy being redefined in terms of measurable, occupationally valuable `competencies'. Here the focus has been less on moral content and more on debates over instructional and assessment theories and methods, and over the accountability' of teachers and systems for producing quantifiable educational results.

These are four central visions of the literate person in the post-war period. In the specific context of this documentary history, all have been predominantly constructed as male and monocultural. Each is still with us today, and each serves different competing ideological, political and economic interests.

Further, what is clear is the shift from 'literature' to 'literacy' as the organising principle for constructing what counts as the literate person, which has implications for English teaching and the English subjects within the mainstream project of schooling. Literary-related concerns are very evident in the early period, and remain significant through the larger course of the debate, as we have documented. This remains the case even when the changing relationship between literature and literacy is taken into account, partly in relation to the restructuring of schooling and new articulations between primary and secondary education.

Traditionally, 'English' was built around particular notions of 'literature' and 'grammar', as well as 'speech' (or oral expression'), all of which involved both 'experience' and 'training'. In particular, what might be called the grammatical subject remains a vexatious point, both in the public sphere and in the profession itself. For instance, in 1950 a ten-day seminar on the teaching of English was held at Queenscliff in Victoria. Much of what was reported as discussed is predictable, and unexceptional. Among the matters of contention, however, was grammar: 'Of all the controversies that kept the Queenscliff discussion alive, probably none created livelier interest than the one concerning grammar'. It is therefore worth recording this here: It would be wrong to say that all of the teachers taking part in the discussion were converted to one particular view of grammar-teaching; but it was interesting to note that all agreed that some grammar should be taught, and that the present drift away from grammar-teaching is having some unhappy results in pupils' expression' (Fowler & Wainwright, 1951: p. 338-9). What explains this drift', then, and how was it registered in public, rather than professional, consciousness? What was its social meaning?(6)

The point is that changing versions of the literate person are directly connected to shifts in the relationship between education and society, and we must look to changes in both these spheres if we are to come to terms with what is at issue in the historical record of the `literacy debate'.

Conclusion

Articles like Losing our romance with [the] printed word' and the everyday claims that teachers encounter in 'literacy debates' of one kind or another have to be approached critically and analytically. As educators and literacy professionals, we dismiss them lightly at our own professional risk. Our task in this project has been to try to identify and disentangle all, or as many as possible, of the associated cultural and political interests at work in such claims. By providing an historical overview of how the present 'came to be', we hope that such a resource as this documentary history - itself something needing to be supplemented and extended by the profession - will offer tools and concepts for taking up this challenge.

At the same time, the professional responsibility of educators is to continually reappraise our own teaching practices and curriculum materials. That is, to say that literacy is a social and historical construction, and to say that it is impossible to document a decline in absolute terms, should not lead to the hasty conclusion that 'all is well' in literacy education. Quite the contrary. Schools, teachers and teaching remain the focus of these same historical forces and institutional interests at work in this history. To respond critically and constructively to curriculum change, to renewed pressures on teaching and learning conditions, to make decisions about how and in what directions to shape literacy, requires that we understand its history. It requires that we understand how literacy is related to social and cultural issues, and to political and economic forces. Only then can we begin to make informed decisions about what should count as literacy, for whom, and in and for what kind of literate culture and society.

REFERENCES

Bessant, J. (1986). Schools under scrutiny during a period of depression. In D. Stockley (ed), Melbourne Studies in Education. Melbourne: La Trobe University Press.

Bessant, J. (1989-90). An historical perspective on the standards debate of the 1970s and 1980s. In D. Stockley (ed), Melbourne Studies in Education. Melbourne: La Trobe University Press.

Boomer, G. (1980). Where should Australia be heading? The Australian Journal of Reading, 3, 1, March. pp 223-30. (Special issue: 'What's Happening to Standards of Literacy?').

Bromley, H. (1989). On not taking literacy literally. Journal of Education, 171, 3. pp. 124-35.

During, S. (1992). Postcolonialism and globalization. Meanjin, 51, 2 Winter. pp. 339-53.

Freebody, P. & Welch, A. (eds) (1993a). Knowledge, Culture and Power: International perspectives on literacy as policy and practice. London and Washington, DC: The Falmer Press.

Freebody, P. & Welch, A. (1993b). Individualization and domestication in current literacy debates in Australia. In P. Freebody and A. Welch (eds), Knowledge, Culture and Power: International perspectives on literacy as policy and practice. London and Washington, DC: The Falmer Press, pp. 209-32.

Fowler, H. and Wainwright, M. (1951). English - What Of It? The Educational Magazine, 8, 8, September. pp 337-339.

Green, B., Hodgens, J. & Luke, A. (1994). Debating Literacy in Australia: A documentary history, 1945-1994, Vols 1 & 2. Deakin University/James Cook University of North Queensland. Melbourne: Australian Literacy Federation.

Green, B., (1996). Born again teaching? Governmentality, 'grammar' and public schooling. In T. Popkewitz and M. Brennan (eds), Governmentality through Education: Foucault's challenge to the institutional production and study of knowledge. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hodgens, J. (1994). How adult literacy became a public issue in Australia. Open Letter, 4, 2. pp. 13-24.

Jupp, J. (1991). Immigration. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Luke, A. (1995). When literacy might (not) make a difference: Folk theories and cultural capital. In C. Baker, J. Cook-Gumperz and A. Luke (eds), Literacy and Power. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Pyvis, D. (1993). There is nothing wrong with Australian speech... is there? Education Australia, 23. pp. 64-6.

Roth, M. (1981). Foucault's 'History of the Present'. History and Theory, 20, 1. pp. 32-46.

Tyler, D. & Johnson, L. (1991). Helpful histories? History of Education Review, 20, 2. pp. 1-8.

(1) For a succinct Australian account of this orientation to historical work, see Tyler and Johnson (1991).

(2) This is notwithstanding the historical work of scholars such as Bessant (1986, 1989-90) who has examined three periods of the articulation of economic crisis and `public criticism of schooling': the 1890s, the 1930s, and the mid-1970s to 1980s.

(3) For particular reference to adult education and the post-1970s debate, see Hodgens (1994).

(4) The decline' thesis is effectively contextualised within a larger, more comprehensive framework in Freebody and Welch (1993b).

(5) Hence the symbolic significance of the recent appearance of expressions such as 'Asia-literacy'.

(6) On this matter, see Green (1996) and Luke 1995).