Lance Irvine's Web Page

I am a graduate of UBC (Honours Philosophy, 1958, BLS, 1967) and of the University of Washington (MA, Philosophy, 1963). I retired as a teacher/librarian after thirty years, twenty-five in Yorkton, Sask., and five in British Columbia and Alberta.

I began teaching in schools supposed to have been revolutionized by the new print and non-print resources which were flooding into the new Comprehensive School System by 1967. The library was philosophically and literally intended to the the centre of a new revolution in public education. I try to show why the television revolution, whatever its impact on society in general, was bound to be still-born in forcing change upon the schools, and why the new computer-based revolution is likely produce similarly disappointing results.

Television, in the early 1970s, was the heart of the new order, and, in many schools, enormous sums were expended on studios and staff. Enthusiasm for television (the Magic Wand of my title) was boundless, and it was confidently predicted that core instruction would soon issue from a central point, making traditional classroom teaching obsolete. Thirty years later, the television set had merely replaced the old 16mm projector, and, unless one glanced at a calendar on the classroom wall, it would be impossible to tell whether the instruction going on there was occurring in 1967 or 1999. Textbooks ruled as supreme as ever, and the library's non-print resources were still used only as an occasional illustrative complement. The teaching of literacy, and the use of library print resources, had, if anything, become less effective.

My book is alternately analytic and auto-biographical, and in it I attempt to trace the organizational realities, as they played out in my experience, which made survival the real object of educators, while education, for all practical purposes, became a by-product. I do offer a program for teaching literacy effectively at the secondary school level, but my first concern is to explain why a coherent approach to teaching literacy has never taken root. We have been left, therefore, with a permanent pool of functional illiterates, which I describe, not in the basket-case scenario of being unable to read traffic signs, but in the everyday inability to move information and ideas from point A to point B. In the Information Age, this incapacity, for many, may prove to be the mother of all disabilities.

I also offer two approaches which were original to our school. One was an effective approach to teaching literacy to non-academic students, devised by an inspired teacher, now deceased, based on the theories of Miller and Nichols. It featured an elaborate sequential ordering of themes and concepts in literature from Grade Ten to Twelve, built on a listen-and-read program where selections were recorded at a variety of speeds to increase comprehension and appreciation.
The literature selections were the basis of instruction in writing, again tailored for this class of students, many of whom were unlikely to receive significant post-secondary training.

The second approach to teaching literacy was related philosophically to the above, although it was designed originally for academic students. As a history teacher and librarian, I felt that, unless I could demonstrate the relevance of library materials in my own work, I could hardly recommend them to others. I developed a strategy I call "teaching through television" in order to organize the standard world history curriculum around the concepts of power and change, and this program is described in detail. I had considerable success in showing that this approach not only produced results well beyond ordinary expectations, but also made textbook-centred teaching obsolete.
Unfortunately, I found that the greater my success, the more marginalized I became. Young teachers, rather than being piqued by my example, and moved to draw on it, instead drew back, even refusing to teach a section of any course I was also teaching, for fear that their work would be compared with mine.

Throughout the book I try to show how the circumscribed environment within which high school libraries operate--notably the significant barrier of classroom autonomy--places strict limits on their ability to influence teaching practice and promote educational change. Since audio-visual resources are typically used only to illustrate textbook sequences, there are built-in limits to their use. There are parallel disincentives to the use of library print resources.

I argue that the shortcomings in the teaching of literacy are largely generic. What passes for change in education is largely mirrored in fads (Magic Wands) and I spend some time showing how such fads can divert attention from the real--and remediable--failures of public education to achieve adequate goals in literacy, permitting a steady dilution of content in favour of feelgood teaching.

The book is intended primarily for the intelligent layperson who is continually frustrated by the evasions of professionals in the attempt to determine what schools are/are not doing, and what can reasonably be expected of them. I have tried to relate the shortcomings of schools to the essential dynamics of the classroom situation, in part by detailing how the library revolution of the early 1970s was fated to come to grief. I argue that the computer revolution, in schools, is likely to prove unable to effect basic improvements in literacy, for many of the same reasons.

In the sense that I regard the public school system as a legitimate part of the solution to the problem of functional illiteracy, the book is optimistic. The other side of the coin-that we professionals are part of the problem-is a central theme of my book.

Last updated: 5 July2008

E-mail address: llirvine@accesscom.ca