It's approaching Autumn, so things must be falling, especially standards of literacy.....If you judge by the media, and especially about late August time, standards of literacy have been falling for so long that it is surely amazing that anyone can still read anything (including the articles about 'the decline of literacy').
I can't remember a time in my adult life when someone wasn't complaining about 'falling standards' - 'students don't know x' or 'students have never have been taught y' (x and y here usually denoting 'spelling' or 'grammar').
It's a ready-made discourse of decline, following similar phrases every year. It's nearly always connected to writing, that vast shifting field of signs where so many ideologies meet and clash and where language is called on to wear every kind of disguise. But usually it's examined or tested writing that triggers the complaint mood, rather than the writing people might do for enjoyment or in their social lives.
Nobody ever talks about 'falling standards of blogging', for example, or 'falling standards in web design', although both involve lots of writing. Maybe they have not risen high enough yet to be able to 'fall'.
No-one ever sits down to actually define it, but it seems there was a golden age when everyone could read and write - and be taught to do so - perfectly, and since that time we have 'fallen'. But where?
Somewhere. To the present. To a place where 'writing', in a million guises, takes place all the time, ceaselessly, and with unprecedented success and diversity. Where the rise of mass global literacy has been one of the great success stories of the last hundred years.
But still people need to believe that literacy's past was better than its present - and its future is barely imaginable.
It's funny, though, that the language of complaint about literacy - a language with its own ritual terrain and taboos, automatically triggered every year by A-level results in the UK (so in August) - rarely acknowledges 'literacy' as itself a changing phenomenon, susceptible to new technologies, new social movements, new styles of communication, to a plural rather than a singular destiny, and not a thing.
Of course 'writing' does not always get such a bad press. On another day, and in another mood, the media will report on new technologies - also new literacies - with unbridled enthusiasm and interest. Then 'writing' enters a brave new world of participation and empowerment, all eyes to the future, not a word of complaint.
It's writing at school, examined writing, student writing, that inspires the dull sense of falling somewhere bad from somewhere better, and the media responds to this powerful strand in the public imagination with an obedient discourse, one that can be easily recycled.
Why is this discourse so durable? In order to keep believing that 'standards have fallen', the complainer must keep believing in 'literacy' as a fixed institution, a thing outside history, immutable, sacred. It must be something schooled and examinable, thus repeatable. And, above all, something measurable. Also, perhaps, a guarantor of the nation, of national identity.
Hence, there will be a nostalgia for the past - or a longing for another country - when it seems like things have 'fallen' out of control in the present, when things are no longer repeated as before, or can't be measured with certainty (how can something as subjective and intangible as a 'standard' be measured?), when 'schooling' seems to have failed to reproduce the past. In a word, when there is change.
But in my view, if literacy is about anything, it is about change.
Resisting a Culture of Complaint
Actually, this discourse of complaint would not bother me so much if it had not once nearly ended my life. I was in my mid twenties, teaching English at a comprehensive school in Huntingdon. I was driving home along the A604 after watching a class of fifteen-year-olds give presentations based on their essays on Hamlet. I had been impressed by their work, and moved by it, and inspired by it, and I remember thinking 'I love my job'.
The voice of John Humphreys on the Today programme managed to change my mood. In an item about 'education', I listened to the usual weary mantra of complaint unfold. 'Standards of literacy in schools have reached an all-time low' ('all-time?' Are you nuts??') boomed that confident, knowing voice. With the image of my Hamlet students and their work - insightful, passionate, careful, literate, contemporary - fresh in my mind, I seethed with anger and despair. I was livid. 'An all-time low? You mean, in the whole of human history? How can you allow your voice to say these inane things?'
I imagined filling the Today programme studio with the students from my class and making John Humphreys actually listen to them, to another source of power, to another voice, one that has no consciousness of being fallen.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the mantra of falling standards nearly killed me that day. My concentration thrown, rage almost led me to drive into the back of a lorry. I pulled off the road, switched off the radio, and calmed down, lucky to be alive. It was the monologue of 'falling standards', in defiance of what I was actually seeing and experiencing, that had driven me mad.
I then decided I would dedicate my life to resisting this hopeless mood, to putting alternative ways of thinking into play, to fostering other kinds of social imagination about language and literacy, even if only for myself (the only person one can ever really change). And to believing that discourse lives always in the future, which is unwritten.
Resisting the voice of John Humphreys, the Today programme, the culture of complaint. Not to 'fall', not to be 'fallen'.
It's a small thing, and what happened that day was entirely 'my fault'. Every August it comes back to me, and I shudder to think.
Except, I realised then that 'discourse' is never just about words and opinions. It has effects too. It can hit you in the stomach. It can be a weapon of power regardless of what is actually being 'said'. Insidious and deadly and complaisant, it can steal pathways into the body as well as the mind.
Every August it comes back to me: the need to struggle for your own voice, not as an inner searching but as a response, and in doing so turning the languages of power against themselves.
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