Page 100 - Literacy in the New Media Age

A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT 89

background knowledge, culturally and linguistically; with the same cultural
capital, to use the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu. Hence the language
curriculum – and that of writing in particular – would have to make all that
knowledge essential for any student to achieve a full competence in writing
available in explicit form.
On the face of it this seemed unexceptionable as an educational aim. In fact it
gave rise to a quite ferocious debate. The goal of explicit teaching of writing
touched, perhaps unwittingly, a number of raw nerves. First and foremost it
touched the nerve of writing as personal expression. This was the expression, in
the curriculum of the school-subject English – whether in England or in Australia
– of the egalitarian politics of the mid-1960s to early 1970s, which wanted to
value all experience and all expression equally. That politics was the response to
Stalinist and McCarthyist authoritarian repression, in the ‘West’ as in the ‘East’.
In a closely related manner it touched, equally unwittingly, the nerve of the idea
which was implicit in that politics, namely that of a culturally homogeneous
society. However, it did so in the face of an unrecognised change in the reality of
those societies, namely that they had, in the meantime, become the culturally
plural societies of the post-industrial ‘West’. So what was intended as an
egalitarian move could only have been that in a culturally homogeneous society,
where everyone could be assumed to come with the same cultural resources into
the school. It could not achieve that aim in a culturally plural society, where it is
often the case that young people come into the school with cultural resources
entirely unequal to those of others in the same classroom.
Let me explain. English had, in England as in Australia, become, post the
‘Dartmouth Conference’ in the mid-1960s, the school-subject which saw it as its
aim to foster the development of the full human being, through facilitating
expression of the person’s individuality. ‘Authenticity’ was seen as one of the
most important features of ‘good’ writing. The moral and pedagogic purpose of
this approach was to foster ‘authenticity’, a kind of being-held-to-account for
one’s (actions in) writing in terms of truth to personal experience. This was a
plausible goal (leaving aside the ethical considerations of this inspectorial/
inquisitorial attitude (which still leaves me highly uneasy) just so long as all the
members of a school-class came from, at least broadly, the same social and
cultural background. If that condition was met, it might then be more confidently
assumed that they would come with the same knowledges and skills around
language and writing – not to mention culture much more generally.
The fact is that this approach to language and writing assumed that all students
shared a homogeneous social background. It was only with that assumption that
it could be thought that all members of a classroom could express their
individual meanings fully, happily or competently, using the resources of
representation of the dominant group. After all, it is impossible to be
authentically ‘me’ in my writing if I do not have anything resembling real
command of the resources of writing which are held to be adequate, in this
language.