ABSTRACT
There are few areas of language education, excepting perhaps bilingual education, that have had the same potential for evoking controversy and contestation as adult literacy. Indeed, a literature has developed, building on the seminal work of Graff (1979, 1996), that documents the recurrent perceptions in the late modern period of crisis and falling literacy standards that have marked public policy making and debate in relation to literacy (Freebody, 1998; Freebody and Welch, 1993; Lo Bianco and Freebody, 1997). This recurrent perception of crisis of course applies equally to initial schooled literacy, the topic of another chapter in this volume, but here my emphasis is on adult literacy learning, post-school or out of school. On a regular basis, adult literacy (or its lack) has been variously linked to both personal and social development and recidivism, to economic regeneration, employment/unemployment and crime. Here is an Australian example of this stance:
There are direct links between poor literacy, school drop out rates and youth unemployment… It is now clear that education policy and practice has failed to improve the literacy standards of a significant proportion of young people. The social and economic consequences of persistent literacy problems are so serious that literacy must be addressed as a matter of priority. (DEETYA, 1996a:1, cited in Black, 2001)
So the ‘literacy debate’ is underpinned by a dark imagery of educational failure, drop-out rates, unemployment, crime. As I write this chapter, for example, a publicity campaign in the United Kingdom to promote literacy learning is explicitly linking, in a series of dramatic images on billboards, lack of literacy to a tendency to resort to crime.
