ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the published proceedings of the 1933 World Education Conference held in Ireland as a basis to engage with external “ways of speaking” about illiteracy. The conference included a formal section on the topic of adult illiteracy, with presentations given by delegates from the United States, Mexico, Spain, and other countries. Within the proceedings, literacy was consistently conflated with intelligence, civilised behaviour, and national progress, while the illiterate person was cast as a disruptive menace to society. Delegates described the presence of illiteracy in their countries, but they took care to locate it within specific marginalised populations. This discourse of disruption constructed the illiterate person as an unwelcome Other. The chapter then explores official education reports from this era, which present positive assessments of schooling in Ireland. The statistics within the reports show high levels of non-attendance and early school leaving from the primary schools. They also contained annual statistics relating to the literacy levels of children resident in reformatories and industrial schools. The final part of the chapter explores concerns about illiteracy raised in submissions made by primary teachers during the 1940s.
