Literacy lives

Margaret Harris, Department of English

 
Literacy is once again a word on everyone's lips, stimulated by the planned reforms of the NSW Higher School Certificate, and colleagues' reactions to the current intake of first year English students. We all confidently define literacy in its basic sense, the ability to read and write, but when the term is used in more abstract and generalised ways, referring to the state of being literate, of possessing education, it can be loaded and tendentious.

Standards of literacy are invariably relative, generally perceived to be in decline from the presumed norms of some previous era. Yet my impression is that the proportion of 'illiterate' students - in the narrow sense of those with weak grammar and spelling - among undergraduates coming into English now is no higher than in the quota-free, fee-paying 1960s when I first taught at this University.

The functional literacy of present-day students is different in important ways, though, from what prevailed thirty years ago. The current population is from an infinitely more diverse ethnic mix, and the primacy of British culture that was assumed back then can no longer be taken for granted. Just as my teachers had to assume that their students knew little about the classical literature and mythology that were the staple of the education system until well into the nineteenth century, so now it would be foolish at best, and offensive at worst, to assume that today's undergraduates have any firsthand knowledge of the Bible - something we need to bear in mind when introducing them to Milton, Melville, and many another.

But the literacy of our students is developed not only by their experience of literary texts. This generation is markedly more visual, and takes for granted film and television, the CD and the computer. Although they are often oblivious to their skill, students have been trained by hours of television, cartoons and advertisements especially, to be sophisticated readers of visual images. Their sense of logic and narrative is not necessarily linear, and is all the richer for that. They may find Dickens and Shakespeare intimidating and irrelevant, and know all about The X-Files, but they're not illiterate.

Those of us who 'teach' literature frequently find ourselves called to patrol the boundary between 'high' and 'popular' culture - like many boundaries, an imaginary line. The essence of our professional mission, in my view, is to establish that reading and writing are not natural practices, and to assist students to read both 'classic' and 'popular' texts by training them to analyse and understand their reading practices. And that requires some understanding of our society and culture, just as understanding Shakespeare and Dickens, hugely popular authors in their time, requires some access to those alien worlds of England in Elizabethan and Victorian times. There are challenges here for our curricula, and our pedagogy.

Professor Margaret Harris has a Personal Chair in English Literature


Copyright ©1998 Centre for Teaching and Learning
Last Modified: 3 April 1998