News From Nowhere: The Revolutionary History of Literacy

In the UK we have been living through the dismantling of the public education system and its privatisation, with little oversight of what is replacing it.  As the state retreats further from providing these and other vital community services it is useful to reflect on what preceded the current system in order to help imagine what might be created in its aftermath – with and without the involvement of the state and capital.

We will look at education as an (always) a contested social space of power [1]. We shall see how over time independent education and cultural activities such as ragged schools, refugee schools, hedgerows schools, debating clubs, art clubs and reading groups etc. signalled a growing working-class identity and confidence. This was one of the vital factors that saw the years leading up to the first world war with an increasingly assertive working-class movement that threatened both the economics and ideas of the capitalist system in the UK and elsewhere. This was enough to push the ruling class to create the 1919 adult education report to bring back such activities under more state control and influence. One (of the many) concrete examples of how seriously this was taken can be seen in the creation of the 5 Literary institute Colleges in London for the adult study of literature the arts. Of which only one now survives.

Literacy (reading and writing) is a useful gauge to measure education in society, past present and future. As literacy improved through the 20^th century left wing critics such as Richard Hoggart [2] (The Uses of Literacy) identified it as a zone of conflict and a means to force a ‘mass culture’ (top down) onto existing cultures. Now, however, adult literacy is in decline in the UK [3] with government figures indicating over 15% of working age adults (6 million) struggle with reading and writing [4] and charities like the national literacy trust putting the figure much higher [5]. With the dominance of the mass media (as foreseen by Hoggart) and now the internet and social media critics like Chris Hedges [6] in the USA make the point that we are now seeing the ‘End of Literacy’ where now only a minority:

“functions in a text-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, the majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic.”

For Black, Hispanic and Poor White communities in the USA the levels of low literacy can be as high as 80%. This has led to calls from community NAACP civil rights activists to pressure local educational school districts to improve their methods of literacy education in schools [7] and discard failed methods supported by commercial publishers.

Here in the UK, we should remember the ruling class have always been ambivalent about literacy and education for the lower classes as these comments [8] from William Playfair in 1805 makes clear:

“reading and writing are not, being but of a very doubtful utility to the labouring classes of society”

Or this from MP Davies Giddy in 1807:

“[Literacy] instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident in the manufacturing counties it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity, it would render them insolent to their superiors…”

So, looking to the future of literacy and education in the UK what can we expect? Barring a return to a more corporate and inclusive organisation of society as we saw after the second world war – which is still possible but unfortunately looks increasingly unlikely. More likely is a negative scenario of more of the same – a collapsing neoliberal order with increasingly inequality and access to basic education. In this scenario we think we can see some return to older examples of self-organisation of education enabled by necessity, easier access to technology and the emergence of community self-help networks.

[1] https://www.routledge.com/Education-and-Power/Apple/p/book/9780415913102

[2] hogg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uses_of_Literacy

[3] https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Country%20note%20-%20United%20Kingdom.pdf

[4] https://citizenliteracy.com/white-paper/

[5] https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/

[6] Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Chris Hedges

[7] The right to read movement: https://www.therighttoreadfilm.org/

[8] Phonics and the Resistance to Reading, Mike Lloyd-Jones