Debates in the media over different aspects of literacy education about the teaching of grammar, reading and the canon, about the place of popular culture in the curriculum and the role of testing, about the use of new technologies and the introduction of a national curriculum are not new. However, in recent years the debates have become so heated and emotional that to characterise them as the literacy wars captures their force and intensity.
In their attacks, the conservative critics have accused literacy teachers of lowering standards by using child-centred approaches that do not provide children with a strong foundation in literacy learning. They have sought to discredit a literacy curriculum they believe is afflicted by relativism, fragmentation and a fixation 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 has been greater emphasis in schools on cultural literacy, the literature of the Western canon and traditional values.
In response, literacy teachers and educators have argued that we can't turn the clock back, nor should we want to. There have been enormous changes in the world of ideas since many of the critics went to school in the 1950s 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.
At the heart of these battles are competing definitions of literacy. Traditionally literacy has been thought of as a cognitive ability. Being literate has been seen as a matter of cracking the alphabetic code, word formation skills, phonics, grammar and comprehension skills. By contrast, more contemporary views see literacy as a social practice that takes place in different settings not only the classroom, but also the workplace and the other locations of everyday life. Reading or writing always involves reading or writing something with understanding.
My view is that both psychological and social understandings of literacy are useful for teaching and learning purposes but that is not the point here. There is no single, correct definition of literacy that would be universally accepted. This lack of agreement about what literacy is helps explain the conflict between the conservatives who want to preserve valued traditions and the literacy teachers who are caught somewhere between the legacy of the past and the imperative to prepare children for the demands of the future.
When conservative critics suggest that the current generation of students has been sacrificed to misguided beliefs about literacy education, they ignore the professional dimensions of what it means to be a literacy teacher in a school or in a university. Literacy teachers across Australia draw on rich and flexible repertoires of skills, resources and professional knowledge to meet the needs of the socially, culturally and linguistically diverse students in their classrooms.
They are engaged in a dialogue between past ways of understanding literacy and present formulations. If such dialogue did not take place, literacy education would be rendered moribund.
The critics have nothing to say about the real issues that confront education in general and literacy education in particular rapid advances in information and communication technologies, the explosion of popular and youth cultures, changes to work, multiculturalism and globalisation. The challenge for literacy teachers and educators is to find solutions to these burning issues that reconcile the very best in our social and cultural traditions with the future needs of Australian students in ways that work in all classrooms for all students.
There is no single answer to improving literacy education. There is no instructional approach or package that is universally effective for all the young people from different cultures, races and backgrounds who populate Australian schools. People have been searching for such a method for decades but it does not exist. What does work is strong school leadership, balanced programs in which literacy teachers make decisions based on the needs of the students, vibrant professional learning communities and staffrooms in which people talk to each other about literacy.
It is time to abandon the language of attack and accusation to concentrate on improving literacy education for all Australian students. There are some real problems but not the ones that the conservative forces have focused on in recent years. There are serious and consistent low levels of literacy performance amongst the poor, the underprivileged, recent migrants and indigenous students. These comprise the disadvantaged in Australian education who are being denied their entitlement.
A literacy agenda for the 21st century is rich with possibilities and the way to construct it is not in a highly politicised campaign of public abuse of teachers but through civil open discussion and dialogue.
Ilana Snyder is an associate professor in the faculty of education, Monash University. Her book, The Literacy Wars: Why teaching children to read and write is a battleground in Australia, was published this month by Allen & Unwin.