ABSTRACT
Every generation believes it provides the best schooling for its children, but a glance back in time shows us that what ‘counts’ as valid teaching and learning is very different from one generation and from one country to another. This is particularly the case for initial literacy teaching. At this point in time, there is a tendency to believe that the answer to successful literacy teaching has only just been discovered, that it is simple and that it lies in the transmission of a particular set of skills by teachers in classrooms. A glance back to earlier times, however, reveals that we cannot disregard the past. The aim of this chapter is to reveal the diversity and contrasts in literacy provision in the two square miles we have studied and to show how these have been shaped by the efforts of educational pioneers or literacy mediators in children’s lives. The chapter has two parts. The first provides a brief history of schooling in and around the City of London, with particular reference to the education of children of the poor. It introduces three schools, the two project schools, Sir John Cass School and Canon Barnett School (formerly Commercial Street School) and the Jews’ Free School. The second part examines some mediators of literacy outside the mainstream school that were important in the lives of our participants: the library, Toynbee Hall, Jewish religious classes and the Qur’anic and Bengali language classes of the Bangladeshi-British community. Throughout the
chapter, we see how the types of literacy skills mastered by children were not isolated but intimately linked with the purpose for which they were learned.
