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October 16, 2006
In the Australian Financial Review Luke Slattery, the AFR’s education editor, has an op-ed (not online, subscription only) that Australia has been seduced by the credo of critical literacy. What is critical literacy? Slattery says that:
Critical literacy draws its authority from the postmodern movement that swept thrrough the Anglophone universities in the 1980s and 90s......Critical literacy is looking at texts--or interrogating them...for explicit or tacit traces of class, gender and race. That is sociology. It's an ideology. And it's a cliche
Quoting the introduction by Ira Shor to a text entitled Critical Literacies in Action Slattery says that critical literacy represents a challenge to the status quo, as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges----it's learned dissent.
What is wrong with that? Shouldn't we be taught to engage in an active, challenging approach to reading and textual practices; one that involves the analysis and critique of the relationships among texts, language, power, social groups and social practices?
Well it doesn't teach students the analytic tools to be critical about critical literacy itself and it ignores the aesthetics of representation. Good points. Slattery goes onto link critical literacy to postmodernsim and to talk about Foucault and Derrida as the high priests of postmodernism that is hostile to truth reason and objectivity that underpin Western cvilization.
Ho Hum---- this is a sophsticated account of the pomo dragon that so concerned so many cultural conservstives and modernists. There is more Slattery here on the postmodern the bogeyman in case you are interested.
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