Thinking pop literacies, or why John Howard should read more.

The author reviews the relationship between 'literature' and pop culture, arguing that both are part of an intellectual continuum, and that to attempt to extol one and demonise the other is not only based on false and simplistic premises, it is exclusive and destructive. She reminds us that 'All education is based on assumptions about standards and quality. We carry values in our minds that subtly but continually remind us of gradings and shadings of importance and significance.' And that this needs to be acknowledged. Education is not value-neutral, objective or ethically and intellectually pure. She draws attention to 'the dire state of debates about education in Australia', and offers a more positive and proactive agenda is offered for 'putting the pop into the literacy'.

Postmodern troubles cannot be adequately handled by modern means. Zygmunt Bauman (1)

ALL EDUCATION IS BASED ON ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT STANDARDS AND QUALITY. TOO OFTEN we teachers and librarians do not admit these assumptions to ourselves, let alone to those who are being taught or instructed in the intricacies of the information age. We carry values in our minds that subtly but continually remind us of gradings and shadings of importance and significance. My aim in the next few pages is to ask all of us involved in education--particularly librarians and teachers--to temporarily disconnect from the outcome-based education, generic competencies, mission statements and strategic plans that flood our inboxes with overlarge attachments and ruin our meetings with overblown rhetoric. For a moment, de-centre content management. Let us not think about what we are teaching, but why we are teaching. Let us not think about computer literacy, but the subtleties of information literacy and the building of knowledge, (2) wherever we may find it in the digital or analogue world. Such a transitory replacement of 'the what' with 'the why' reveals our assumptions about teaching and learning, reading and writing. For a moment, we will embrace Paul Hager's description of learning 'as a contested and poorly understood concept.' (3) Such a definition reminds us why so much money and time has been spent on software and hardware, while librarians, information professionals and teachers have been starved of resources, made redundant or disrespected as minor players in the management of education. My task in this paper is to probe cultural value in the contemporary environment of teaching, learning and librarianship. First, there is attention to the dire state of debates about education in Australia. Second, a more positive and proactive agenda is offered for putting the pop into the literacy. To unravel the scale of this contestation and miscomprehension of teaching, learning and cultural value, we commence at the top.

Rubbish

That old aphorism to the effect that 'a week is a long time in politics' does not state the half of it. Between 20 and 22 April 2006, John Howard triggered the most ruthless attack on education within memory. Then, with the press and public attention safely diverted from the claims of corruption in and of the Australian Wheat Board, the Prime Minister could get on with the business of validating the current war in Iraq by drawing simple historical and nationalist connections with the 'heroic diggers' just in time for ANZAC Day on 25 April. Yet his political 'week'--of three days--will have lasting consequences for those of us who teach for a living, rather than simply talk about it. The Prime Minister moved on to other issues. His attacks on professionalism, intelligence, expertise and the value of scholarship last much longer than the next news cycle.

On Thursday 20 April 2006 John Howard stated on radio that 'I mean we all understand it's necessary to be able to be literate and coherent ... and we also understand there's high-quality literature and there's rubbish, and we need a curriculum that encourages an understanding of the high quality literature and not the rubbish.' (4) Ponder the phrasing: 'I mean we all understand' and--again--'we also understand'. There is no evidence presented or experts consulted. Merely repeating words like 'we understand' and 'rubbish' does not make the statements true.

Once the Prime Minister of a country starts using words like 'gobbledygook' and 'rubbish' to describe an English curriculum, all the crazy cold warriors defrost themselves to find reds, not only under the bed, but also in our classrooms and universities. The word 'Marxist' was used more often in mainstream press during two days in April than in a whole year on Trotskyite blog spots. Suddenly I realised to whom these commentators were referring. Anyone who works in a school or university, and reads widely, is dangerous. They must be Marxists. The editorial from The Australian on 22 April 2006 reads as follows:

 
   One of the more bizarre aspects of the controversy is the 
   postmodern fixation on Karl Marx as an appropriate filter 
   though which to examine literature. For one thing, he was 
   an economist, not a literary critic. For another, his writings 
   inspired the deaths of perhaps 100 million people around the 
   world, and this tragedy is better learned about in history 
   classrooms. And teaching high school students to interpret 
   literature through ephemeral 'isms' is, by definition, a way 
   to produce students with dated knowledge. (5) 

It is important for those of us who do read, rather than those who are merely critical about other people's reading, to rebut this nonsense with clarity, boldness and frequency. This opinion--in a national newspaper--was wrong factually and in interpretation. Post-modernism and Marxism are divergent theoretical and political formations. If Marx is blamed for Stalinist purges, then Charles Darwin is responsible for Nazism and Jesus of Nazareth caused the Crusades. Social scientific causality ('A' creates 'B') requires more proof than the woolly thinking of a newspaper editor without epistemological awareness or historical reasoning. Even more disturbingly, this editorial was cut and pasted into diverse websites and blogs to increase its circulation and 'truth effect', not 'truth'. (6)

The tragedy of this 'debate' is that serious points of discussion about teaching and librarianship have been smeared with the tar of obfuscation. In these two days in April, four separate discussions, about literacy, the English Literature curriculum, popular culture and post-modernism, were merged and blurred. All four topics would have some value in being raised for public debate, but assuming a convergence was a mistake. Literacy has been much more than the encoding and decoding of print since Richard Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy in 1957. The Prime Minister is fifty years out of date in this debate. The discussions about the English Literature curriculum have their origins in claims made by Colin McCabe in 1981 that Derrida--an evil Frenchman--was destroying the pleasure and purity of great English books through his 'foreign' ideas. So the Prime Minister is twenty-five years out of date on this issue. To abuse popular culture as 'rubbish' is to repeat Matthew Arnold's argument--made in 1869--in Culture and Anarchy. In this context, Arnold was 'protecting' the middle class from a revolutionary working class, using claims for the greatness of 'literature' to block disempowered, barely literate citizens from thinking about the conditions of their own lives. Literature was a replacement for political consciousness, a salve for socialist thought. Further, the 'great writers' that the Prime Minister is protecting, such as William Shakespeare, were profoundly popular playwrights in their own time, commenting--often with humour--about the pompous, prideful men who hold power. The issue is not the division between high culture and popular culture. To put it another way, the problem is not in 'the pop'. The goal for effective teaching and information management is to facilitate a dynamic, energetic and relevant culture that encourages thought, debate and a dialogue with the time from which it emerges.

While the comments on literature, popular culture and literacy were dated, the attack on 'post-modernism' was the strangest in this carnival of ignorance. I have not mentioned the word post-modernism in a classroom since …