I must confess that I left teaching in 1992 fairly disillusioned and bitter about the prospects of change and progress in education, particularly in the teaching of writing, the role of school libraries, and in the tyranny of textbook teaching. All indications were that, if change did occur, it would not be for the better. Indeed, I had begun to fear that change could seldom, in principle, be for the better in public education.
I waited for two years before committing to print conclusions drawn from thirty years in teaching and library work, partly to let my sense of outrage lessen. I then submitted the manuscript to colleagues for comment and criticism, and it soon became apparent that I had still some significant revisions to make. I wanted to call a spade a spade, cutting through the usual self-serving professional evasions. But I also wanted to be fair. I accept sole responsibility for any harshness which remains, and do not apologize for it.
My gratitude goes to Gordon Matthews, an administrator almost without parallel in my experience, for initial criticism. I found that almost all his suggestions had merit. Considerable revisions were also made after helpful comment and criticisms from Donal Hurley, who I respect as one of tine more distinguished English teachers of my acquaintance. My daughter Alvina, no mean critic in her own right. made some final valuable corrections, including a reordering of the chapter sequence. I wish also to thank Ken Haycock, Director of the school of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, who reviewed the text and offered several very useful suggestions.
I write for intelligent lay-persons frustrated by the endless merry-go-round and obstructionism which any attempt to assess the educational environment and make it effective in promoting literacy meets with from my colleagues in the profession. If I thought that my colleagues in general were secure enough to recognize what needs to be changed, and brave enough to admit to past failures, I would probably have concluded that my book was unnecessary. Current changes in education, however, continue to reinforce an impression that my criticisms of public education, which might have seemed a bit too extreme at the outset, may yet prove to be too conservative.
This book and all the course materials for both Norman Wood's General English and my own Grade Ten and Grade Eleven Academic and General History courses, will be found in the Saskatchewan Archives in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Book available for download: magicwand.zip
Lance Irvine's Web page
There has been much discussion in recent times of the inability of graduates of Canadian schools to read or express themselves coherently. Fully one-third of beginning university students lack basic skills in the written communication of information, either in the sending of information (writing) or in the receiving of information (reading), and too many lack the ability to receive a verbal communication and record a coherent summary of it; in plain English, they are at a disadvantage in reading, writing, and making notes.
It is the lack of literacy in this sense that I will be concerned with in this book. I will use the expression functional illiteracy to mark: not the basket cases who cannot decipher traffic signs, but the legions of typical high school graduates who cannot use their native language productively, despite the possession of a superficial ability to speak or put words down on paper. Public education stands or falls not on its capacity to create well-adjusted individuals, but on its day to day performance in dealing with the needs of any student to move information from point A to point B.
I am not here concerned with literature as such, nor with the many benefits of being a well-rounded individual. The reality is that too many English teachers teach as if their ultimate professional fantasy could be realized only by the development or discovery of a new Shelley or W.O. Mitchell. For them, reading and writing have reality only in a creative context, as an outpouring of the human soul. The student must have Fun when he learns if he is to learn. The neglect of composition, the aspect of literacy rooted in the transmission of information, derives in part from the preoccupation of educators with the less demanding alternative of literature, with its promise of instant success in student motivation if only the right reading and interest level buttons can be found.
We will see that the search for alternatives to formal writing is itself a symptom of functional illiteracy. Literacy may begin with reading in the primary grades, but the problem of illiteracy cannot be cured simply by encouraging students to read, and diverting the attack on the problem into the vain pursuit of literature titles which can somehow endure the seduction of television and computers is a mug's game. Inculcate the capacity to shape and transmit information, and literature will take care of itself.
Not surprisingly, to the extent that writing enters into the secondary English classroom it tends to do so in relatively superficial literary forms-character sketches and descriptive paragraphs-rather than in exposition, the management of information in order to explain or convince. Since I hold that mediocrity in literacy skills rests precisely on neglect and ignorance of formal exposition, I have always had to smother an urge to strangle creative writing enthusiasts with piano wire. Creative writing has a place, but not with Average Joe Kid, who has to learn to move information about. For this purpose it would be better to treat creative writing as extra-curricular activity, or at least as an optional subject. Either way, creative writing should be offered largely to those with some measure of ability and interest in literary pursuits. Those who have not progressed beyond laundry lists need narrower, and more specialized, writing skills, and a little formal discipline won't do the creative types any harm either.
I will argue that the proper purpose of language teaching is to establish skill in the organization and transmission of information, and it is the failure to take this function seriously which lies at the heart of the failure of public education to equip its clientele to face the world. Teachers are not taught what writing in this sense is, nor are they taught how to teach it. Lacking confidence in the intrinsic appeal of expository writing, they fall back on trying to sugarcoat the pill. Hence the emphasis on classroom management techniques which at best may favour some interest in fiction and poetry, despite evidence that few of their students will ever read either as adults. No matter: the hope that students will enjoy what they are doing has a point-happy students (or students who at least can be successfully distracted or diverted from troublesome behaviour) will not cause discipline problems, and a class without discipline problems will not attract unwanted attention from administrators or other outsiders.
Teachers are conscious of the frustration and anger of the society at large with the results of much of their efforts . The result is a frantic search for magic wands (catchy literature titles, surefire classroom management techniques, appealing subject matters) which will keep everyone happy, allow teachers to be effectively invisible, and get them that much closer to retirement. This pressure for survival penetrates classroom doors with an ease normally denied other influences. Always preoccupied with classroom behaviour, and alarmed at the prospect of having their performance subject to external review, teachers come to an implicit understanding or Compact with their superiors and colleagues: provided that they do not besiege their administrators with discipline cases, the administrators will allow them autonomy at least within the walls of their classrooms, never inquiring too closely what goes on there, and protecting them from pressures for unwanted change, all in the name of Professional Freedom. Thus the normal impulse of ego and turf protection is reinforced by classroom reality, and results in a professional conservatism hostile to any external pressure which may seem to threaten classroom peace and stability.
Nor is this desire for protection altogether misplaced. For every practical change there are dozens of censors, special interests (abortion, creationism, feminism, visible minorities), current educational fads or even inveterate teacher-haters, exerting pressure to tinker with the classroom and the curriculum, for good or ill, at the drop of a textbook. For the harried teacher sometimes only marginally in command of his subject matter, and beset with ever larger classes and ever more erratically trained and motivated students, hazards are everywhere.
The concession by administrators of a significant measure of classroom autonomy, however, is not free. The Office Mafia, the non-teaching members of staff (not exclusively professionals), is as spooked by the prospect of instability as the classroom teacher is. They, too, seek to expand their turf to ensure their security. It is no accident that educators are saddled with so many fads and expected to perform so many different roles. Each new task, especially if it promises some new socially desirable outcome (whether the school can usefully undertake it or not) gives enriched turf and influence to a school's "Office Mafia", who, like their teachers, are subject to the many constraints which shape a school's operations.
The term "Mafia" is not intended to suggest anything sinister. Administrators, like teachers, come in all sizes. Most are striving honestly to do their duty as they see it. The burden of this book will be to flesh out why educational outcomes in the teaching of literacy can be so unsatisfactory, assuming even the best efforts of all concerned. There are always those who are lazy, insecure, mediocre, and petty, and they will aggravate an already difficult situation. However, rather than cast about for someone to attach Blame to, and raise up for many professionals the spectre of accusations of incompetence, we need to examine the institutional deadweight which bears down on all of us, and to ask whether we are doomed to partial and mediocre successes, punctuated by frequent shortfalls, no matter how well we try. By "Mafia" I seek merely to underline the sense of isolation which overtakes professionals who, preoccupied with their separate concerns, tend to work under the same roof but not together, except superficially. The result is a readiness to tolerate a degree of mediocrity in order to survive a career in education.
I trust that it will gradually become evident as my account unfolds that, given enough negative pressure, the real object of professional life in high schools becomes survival, even at the cost of some fundamental objectives. Few would admit this publicly-in thirty years, for example, I have never seen the subject of the illiteracy of the typical high school graduate ever surface in a teacher's workshop or professional development seminar. No-one ever dares admit that there is a critical problem begging for definition and resolution, much less admit that the primary locus of responsibility lies within the education system rather than in passing the buck to an external and negative social environment. Better to pretend that the problem does not exist than to admit that educators cannot define it or are too ill-trained to deal with it. Denial is a professional characteristic of bureaucracy, educators included.
If the subject intrudes at all, it does so only indirectly, and in a form which directs attention elsewhere. Teachers in convention will be reminded that their students rank with any others in Canada, conveniently forgetting that it is precisely the performance of the average graduate which is the problem. In any event, given X jurisdictions, all X will claim to be above the average. Teachers will applaud when told of how unfair it is, anyway, to compare the performances of different provincial or state jurisdictions, when few of them want to compare their performances with anything outside their classrooms, whether in the same country or just down the hall. Above all, they will never raise the question of what writing, and thus functional illiteracy, consists in, lest it bring outsiders to the door with expectations the teacher may be ill-equipped to meet. This is why an outsider will need a calendar to tell whether the teaching going on in most classrooms is occurring in 1967 or 1995.
It is just as well that many of the costs of functional illiteracy are hidden, so that a substantial gap exists between the genesis of the problem and the public awareness of it. Every teacher who has had to dilute the content of her English or History program has reacted to functional illiteracy. Students can no longer deal with extended logical discourse, with the result that modern reformers have belatedly, and conveniently, discovered the virtues of posters, panel discussions, itemized reports, verbal presentations, or group work of one kind or another, as attractive alternatives the hard discipline of exposition. If we can't beat them, we join them.
The fruits of illiteracy are already being felt in the downgrading of the traditional emphasis on English and History in the curriculum, as teachers grasp at alternatives which will keep everyone happy and complaisant. I will spend some time emphasizing opportunities being lost already in the teaching of History, where teachers must rely on grinding through simplified textbooks because they and/or their charges lack the degree of knowledge and literacy which would make more exciting horizons feasible. The potential of audio-visual resources, not to mention the traditional print resources of libraries, has also, as we shall see, been sadly blunted, so much so that full-time librarians in school libraries are becoming an expensive frill.
The impact of functional illiteracy is so pervasive that it becomes a background condition for teachers, almost like the oxygen they breathe. No wonder a direct assault on it seems so futile. I will try to flesh out the reality of student illiteracy by recounting some of my own progress through the educational briar-patch, recounting the frustrations of trying to bring to life the potential of libraries and History in environments where only the naive or the self-serving will maintain that intellectual achievement and literacy were at the core of the educational enterprise. Most teachers of writing pay at least lip service to the central position of writing and rationality, but what they take to be an adequate standard will depend upon their training, and training in the teaching of writing is all but non-existent. The art of teaching writing is largely mastered, if at all, after the teacher closes the classroom door for the first time. Most, like the wise men each touching a different part of the elephant, will make an honest effort to do well, but few are willing, or care to admit, that they might have it wrong in important respects.
It will be necessary, therefore, to spend much time and detail in the later chapters on those approaches and mechanics which I found work, even while the working reality of teaching, indeed the very metabolism of the teaching environment, seems ever able to isolate and reject anything or anybody which does not readily serve institutional needs for survival and avoidance of Blame. The reader will at least know what I mean by teaching literacy, and the amateur will be better able to assess claims to expertise in the teaching of literacy at the high school level by comparing my models and procedures with the claims of others. There is no need for exact duplication, but there had better be a basic resemblance. The writing menus teachers offer are varied to the point of anarchy, with all using the same words but speaking a different language.
Educators can be counted on to ignore or sublimate anything which might strike at the heart of what they are doing rather than risk openly admitting that, as things stand, they can offer no reply to those who are looking for alternatives to the mediocrity in literacy which has become so familiar a norm. They will find ways of diverting unpleasant public scrutiny by focusing on other things than literacy: student fulfillment or self-image, social problems such as sexual abuse, drugs, violence, or teenage pregnancy. While such considerations have a place, we need to bear in mind that social problems have always been with us, and must not be allowed to distract educators from the objectives they alone can pursue effectively.
No-one in education dares claim outright that literacy will never be achieved until we create a perfect society; the public suspects that we ought to be doing better now. They are right. The fact is that there is a deep-seated problem in the teaching of literacy, which we have never squarely faced up to. It is solvable and solvable by the public school system, but only if public educators accept responsibility for the problem and leave off either denying its existence, or making a fatal admission that a solution, in the end, is beyond our capacities unless society rescues us by reforming itself first. My thesis, that public education can meet the challenge is, therefore, an optimistic assessment, no matter how negative it may appear at first blush.
Plato defined wisdom as knowing what it is that one does not know. Educators notoriously lack wisdom in this sense, and thus fail to see that the solution to the gathering public revolt is within reach if only they have the courage to abandon the precious isolation of classroom autonomy, and the insulation of enlarged turfs. Prisoners of those four walls, they imagine themselves free as professionals only if they can exercise a veto over what goes on there, provided they keep up their end of the Compact. I have enough hope left for the potential of public education, and its legions of well-meaning, hard-working, and typically under-trained and short-sighted professionals, to challenge that illusion in what follows.