ABSTRACT
This chapter examines documents such as teacher newsletters and military recruit training programmes to explore illiteracy in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. These documents describe how the state-funded vocational schools and the Defence Forces provided literacy education for young adults seeking employment. The discourse of practical English constructed illiteracy as an unremarkable feature of everyday life within vocational schools and the military. The objective of intervention was to produce functionally literate adults and the solution was to offer practical, employment-orientated literacy education. Within the discourse of practical English, the illiterate person held the potential to participate fully in employment. This discourse offered a favourable place for the illiterate person, countering the discourse of disruption that constructed illiteracy as a negative impediment to modern society. However, the provision of literacy education was cloaked in silence, reflecting the peripheral position of the vocational schools and the military in Irish society. The chapter argues that such silence provided tacit support for the prevailing belief in the capacity of the state-funded education system to produce a uniformly high level of literacy, which is a component of the narrative of full literacy.
