The Literacy Wars, by Ilana Snyder

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of human speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible …
—G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion

Of course, when texts are mentioned I don’t just mean books (does anybody these days?) but non-print texts, advertisements, songs, sporting events, and so on. Even product packaging. I spent a very productive twenty minutes or half an hour in a Women’s Literature class earlier this year with two Kleenex boxes …
—Ray Misson, the University of Melbourne

In writing The Literacy Wars, the Monash University academic Ilana Snyder makes no bones about who the enemy is and the reason she wanted the book published. In her words: “it was the Murdoch paper’s crusade against contemporary approaches to literacy education that motivated me to write the book … It is time to hold them to account.”

Given the parlous state of English teaching in our universities and our teacher training institutions, the public might be forgiven for thinking the Fourth Estate has every reason to hold those responsible to account—not so Dr Snyder and like-minded groups like the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.

Not only do the defenders of failed experiments like “whole language”—where students are taught to look and guess whole words instead of learning phonics and phonemic awareness—and critical literacy—a Neo-Marxist-inspired approach where students are made to analyse texts in terms of “theory”—argue that there is no crisis, but they also attack so-called conservative opponents as ideologically motivated. In the jaundiced eyes of Ms Snyder, any criticism of the “cultural Left’s” new-age and politically-correct approach to English as a subject, instead of carrying any validity or weight, is dismissed as the type of reactionary, conservative spin associated with the years of the Howard government.

In explaining the intensity of the media’s coverage of issues such as literature being drowned in postmodern gobbledygook, undergraduate students, after six years of secondary school, not being able to write a properly structured, grammatically correct essay and students leaving primary school illiterate, Ms Snyder argues:

“However, it is the defenders of traditional approaches to literacy, not the advocates of
contemporary practice, who have enjoyed consistent media attention. Before the Coalition gained office, the conservative forces were sometimes given a run in the press but not with the relentless regularity of the Howard years.”

Ignored is the reality, illustrated by Andrew Leigh’s research at the ANU, that standards, notwithstanding the additional millions spent, have failed to improve over the last ten years or so. Also ignored are the surveys of academics arguing that undergraduate students are ill-prepared for tertiary study, and Australia’s declining performance in the OECD-sponsored PISA literacy tests—where Australian fifteen-year-old students dropped from second ranking in 2000 to sixth in 2006.

That The Literacy Wars presents a one-sided and shallow defence of the New English is most evident in Ms Snyder’s treatment of critical literacy. Teaching rhetoric, or what was once known as clear thinking, has always been an important part of the subject. In addition, reading poems like Blake’s “London”, books like Orwell’s Animal Farm, Huxley’s Brave New World or the plays of Bertolt Brecht, helps to promote a highly critical view of the status quo and established values.

Characterising a cultural heritage model of English, associated with Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis, as mindlessly endorsing a patriarchal, Euro-centric and middle-class view of the subject, associated with “God, King and Country”, is both misleading and simplistic.
Ms Snyder also underplays the fact that critical literacy involves considerably more than teaching students how to weigh arguments objectively or how to respond with discrimination. Combining the writings of the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and postmodern “theory” associated with Foucault, critical literacy is consumed with analysing “texts” in terms of power relationships and the politically-correct trinity of gender, ethnicity and class.

Feminists argue that fairy tales like Cinderella and plays like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet privilege heterosexual relations and unfairly characterise women as feminine and submissive. According to a Queensland English syllabus, when reading a novel by D.H. Lawrence students must critique “the operation of binary oppositions which privilege a particular version of masculinity” and, on reading poetry by Wordsworth or Les Murray, be made to produce “an eco-critical reading”.

Such is the ideological, politically-correct nature of critical literacy that Wayne Sawyer, the one-time editor of the national English teachers’ journal English in Australia, argued that the election of the Howard government in 2004 was evidence that teachers had failed to teach young people how to think. In the mind of Wayne Sawyer, and a view endorsed by the AATE, the fact that young people voted for the Coalition government was evidence that “English failed not only to create critical generations, but also failed to create humane ones.”

Parents and the public might be forgiven for thinking that concerns about falling standards, students’ inability to read with understanding and to write with precision are well motivated. Not so Ms Snyder. Debates about grammar, for example, are characterised as a “clash between proponents of social control and proponents of social autonomy”, and such arguments “are as much about the restoration and renewal of traditional hierarchical relations in society as they are about society”.

Notwithstanding the above criticisms, in writing The Literacy Wars, Ms Snyder does perform a useful task. She admits that, in the pursuit of creativity and self-expression, many English teachers failed to teach formal grammar, syntax, punctuation and spelling, and also that: “The issue of fragmentation of the curriculum is real and there are also problems with political correctness as it has played out in Australian schools.”
Somewhat ironically, in arguing the case for the New English, Ms Snyder also unwittingly reveals the contradictory and self-serving nature of the “cultural Left’s” agenda for English as a subject.

In addition to writing for the Australian, Kevin Donnelly taught English for eighteen years and his PhD thesis examines developments in English teaching since the late 1960s. He has been a member of state and national curriculum committees and is a past member of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.