One of the most encouraging debates in Australia in 2004 was the one over reading.
I cannot recall another year when reading was the subject of so much discussion. It was an Olympic year; a year of wars and natural disasters and an election year nationally and locally.
It was astonishing that reading got such prominence. How well we read? How many of us cannot read? What role should government play in encouraging reading? How is reading taught? What do we read? Does it matter how well or what we read?
The question was politicised in 2004 in an unprecedented way. Opposition Leader Mark Latham, shortly after taking the leadership in December, 2003, made reading a major subject of his campaigning. He launched three reading policies: Bookstart, Read Aloud Australia and Read Aloud Ambassadors.
“This is a program to make more storybooks available to improve the literacy and reading capacity of all children in this country, to encourage parents to read to their children and to give them the opportunity to enjoy that great part of life,” Latham said.
Labor’s approach was a hand-out of book vouchers.
The Coalition could not be left doing nothing.
Education Minister Brendan Nelson said, “Children, at the age of nine or 10, are barely literate,” he said. “I get very emotional about this sort of thing. I’m determined to try to do something about it.”
He said the Government would be providing a $700 reading tutorial credit to parents whose child was below the national Year 3 reading benchmark in 2003. The tutorial credit can be used for individual reading tuition outside school hours.
Nelson slammed university teaching faculties. He did not have to worry about upsetting the teaching unions.
Amid this political debate ran a debate about teaching methods: whole-of-language vs phonics.
The whole-of-language approach said reading was a naturally acquired skill, just like speaking. There was no need to drill students with boring rote learning of the sounds that make up a word.
At the extreme of the whole-of-language approach was a post-modernist streak that rejected a hierarchy of quality – asserting instead that all expressions of thought had equal value. It did not matter if the rules were not followed. The US, Canada and New Zealand were ensnared by the whole-of-language approach.
In all, it seemed Australia had a crisis of illiteracy because those ill-disciplined trendies from the 1960s had destroyed good old-fashion rote learning.
In November, Nelson ordered an inquiry into reading. Then in December, the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development brought out an international survey of 15 year olds which put Australia second (behind only Finland) for reading literacy. The Program for International Student Achievement put Australia fourth in mathematical literacy.
The teaching unions and Labor gleefully asserted that all was well with Australian teaching.
But that is not the end of the story. The OECD test did not bother with punctuation, spelling and grammar. Moreover, it revealed that in reading, more than one in 10 of our students achieved only at the two lowest levels of proficiency. As PISA reported, these students are “at risk of not acquiring essential life skills, partly because they do not have the foundation of literacy skills needed for continued learning and extending their knowledge horizon”.
Australia was doing well at the top and the middle, but failing those at the bottom.
Australian students were managing despite whole-of-language, not because of it. And those denied the phonics method of teaching were ending up illiterate.
It is an interesting twist that the Coalition’s policy is geared to those at the bottom of the heap – where Labor should be directing its attention.
And the debate raged about what we are reading. On one side were those who thought the study of the classics of literature were essential. This was the way to understanding the human condition – Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and so on. Most of these were on the phonics side of the teaching debate. On the other side were supporters of more modern texts; they had equally valid statements.
This is more dangerous territory for the traditionalists. There are good scientific arguments for saying that reading and writing are taught, not natural skills, and that they require discipline, rules and some rote learning. But the argument for studying the classics falls away when the same rigour is applied.
Most of the classics were written in ignorance of the great advances of the 20th century, particularly genetics, psychology, statistics and medicine.
The questions of nature v nurture, bad vs bad, or why was this pestilence or natural disaster visited on us can be better answered by scientific inquiry than Shakespeare, Austen or the King James Bible. Entertaining and enthralling, but not essential.
But it is essential for anyone wanting a half-way decent life in Australia to be able to read and write. In 1996 national survey of reading found that 27 per cent of Year 3 and 29 per cent of Year 5 students failed to reach the minimum standard.
Let the reading debate continue until the standard improves.
++ I am taking a break next week. This column will reappear on January 15.