THERE seem to have been an awful lot of wars fought on the open plain of debate in this country over the last couple of years.

The History Wars were first, perhaps; Keith Windschuttle appointed himself to the invisible position of John Howard’s personal Historian, seeking to bring his unique and revisionist view of post-colonial history to bear in such a way that the brutality of invasion is rendered somehow insipid.

It is not the intention of this article to critique Windschuttle, or his chief nemesis in this particular theatre of war, Professor Henry Reynolds (although I will admit to some good old-fashioned loyalty to the Professor, because he lives in Launceston for at least some of the time). Robert Manne also gets an honourable mention for attempting to restore some balance and credibility to this issue.

Rather, Windschuttle’s neo-conservative propaganda has sparked a worrying trend in debate in Australia. The History Wars (which are about to flare up again, I believe, with the impending publication of Windschuttle’s whitewashing of the White Australia Policy) have paved the way for the arrival here of what is known in the US as the Culture Wars, and for some reason the Teaching of English seems to have become a particular target for those who rank themselves behind Windschuttle in perpetuating Howard-friendly, conveniently contrived intellectual argument.

Teachers, it seems to me, are something of a soft target. They are prevented from defending themselves in letters to the editor, for fear of censure from those higher up the decision-making food chain, and they serve several masters: their students first and foremost, and then the parents of those students, and then the curriculum-setters and policy makers of the state Departments of Education around the country, and finally perhaps the wider community, into which their students will one day be released to fend for themselves. To generalise about teachers, as many opinion-meisters have done in the national press over the last several months, is like mentioning that the sun is hot.

Firstly, some history. In 2004, Professor Wayne Sawyer published an editorial in the journal of the Australian for the Teaching of English, English in Australia (141). In this editorial he was specifically critical of the Howard government for its myriad sins against humanity, such as Tampa, the Children Overboard charade, the sinking of SIEV-X, mandatory detention of asylum seekers, involvement in the war in Iraq and so on. He intimated that English teachers needed to adopt a stronger Critical Literacy approach in students to provide them with the skills to interpret how an issue — such as Tampa, for example — may be fed to them through the media. Critics of this article — Kevin Donnelly chief among them — have argued that Sawyer blames English teachers for the re-election of the Howard Government, though this is a convenient misrepresentation of the editorial. Donnelly further argues that Sawyer seems to be advocating a classroom ethos that should concern itself with the production of ‘politically correct new age warriors’ . Donnelly also argues that Sawyer is one of a body of ‘those seeking to control our schools [who] prefer indoctrination to education’ .

To any thinking, feeling teacher, toiling away at the coalface of the contemporary classroom, planning intellectually stimulating, developmentally challenging units of work, an attitude such as this seems an egregious insult. Indoctrination is a rather loaded word, commensurate perhaps with brainwashing, suggesting perhaps that all students should be taught in the same way, using the same resources, and lead towards the same outcomes. I am given to wonder whether Donnelly has recently set foot in a classroom at all, although doing so would probably run counter to his politically convenient points of view. (It might demonstrate for him that, shock horror, teachers are human beings: like Shylock, if you prick them, they will bleed. They have senses, affections, passions. The extent to which these qualities might find their way into a learning environment becomes, and should be, a matter of professional integrity, of which more later.)

Defence of Sawyer’s article was taken up by Paul Sommer, President of AATE. He reiterated that Sawyer stated his personal opinions in the editorial, but that an editorial is indeed the place to do so. Ironically, Sawyer’s calls for more entrenched use of Critical Literacy approaches in classrooms might lead one to ask some interesting questions of Donnelly’s critique of the editorial.

The editorial smacked of Right apologia

I should add here that the majority of this debate, in particular Donnelly’s ‘free reign’ responses and arguments, unfolded in the pages of The Australian, a newspaper with a decidedly conservative slant to its own editorialising. More recently this newspaper has fielded (and vigorously defended) criticism of its coverage of the Iraq War, and one of the claims made by Sommer is that his attempts to refute Donnelly’s claims via Letters to the Editor have gone unpublished, while Donnelly is handed precious column inches on the Op-Ed Page with curious consistency. In a recent Editorial, The Australian attacked the Australian Education Union for the nature of its contribution to Dr Brendan Nelson’s Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy. This editorial smacked of Right apologia, a point I raised in a Letter to the Editor I wrote in response to it. My letter remains unpublished.

Sommer accuses Donnelly of a ‘dangerous intellectual nostalgia’ , manifest in the “idea that children, once identified as having literacy “problems” can be “cured” with a shot of a particular methodology. This is a very simplistic notion and does not begin to address the complexities of a student’s life these days.”

And herein lies the problem. So much of the neo-conservative blathering that emanates from the likes of Donnelly and Windschuttle is based on one apparently simple premise: the reduction of extremely complex issues to generalised absolutes. There was no genocide of the Aboriginal owners of this country. The White Australia Policy was not a racist document. English Teachers are lefty ideologues. These are easily palatable for the chardonnay sipping Liberal voters of Australia’s leafy suburbs, but they have one thing in common, which is shared by most generalisations: they are bullshit.

The latest flag-waver for this cause is none other than Mr Luke Slattery, one-time columnist for The Australian and now, it seems, a free-lance intellectual bully. His cause du jour is the adoption of post-modernism in the teaching of texts in (again) English classrooms. The neo-cons in charge of column space at The Australian have been extremely generous with Mr Slattery this year. He has repeatedly been allowed to flex his ideological muscle apparently unchallenged, certainly unbothered by any consideration for the particularities of English teaching. (In the edition of the Weekend Australian dated July 23-24, Slattery had no less than three separate swipes at his cherry; Donnelly weighed in against Critical Literacy on July 26th, which I do not accept as a coincidence. Slattery also claims, in an article published in The Australian on July 30th, that his ‘expose of the postmodern classroom’ in its pages should not “be seen as part of a conservative political agenda”. This sounds just a trifle naïve, to me, given its juxtaposition with the aforementioned Donnelly article and the brouhaha over Professor Wayne Sawyer’s editorial.)

The central tenet of Slattery’s concern is the extent to which post-modernist readings of texts, and deconstructionist views of the Role of the Author (Slattery appropriates, but I think misquotes, Derrida and his claim that there is no truth outside of text, for his argument) have come to inform the teaching of English, and by extension ruin the enjoyment of reading and literature for students from Burnie to Broome. One particular article which appeared in The Australian was nothing except a barely disguised point-form shopping list of sins he maintains English teachers and curriculum designers have, in his broad view, committed against The Book.

I will not claim to be any kind of an expert on the finer details of post-modernist philosophy, and it is not my intention to become mired in repeating any such details here. Slattery seems to be unfairly critical of Critical Literacy; I say unfairly because his protests at its presence in classrooms do not seem to be informed by any direct or intimate knowledge of the discipline. If one pursues Slattery’s arguments to their logical end, he might appear to be frowning at the presence of questions in classrooms: we should, apparently, accept what we read on the page, we should marvel in the mastery of the Dead White Males, and we should all be bloody well thankful for it.

Surely (Slattery) is also debasing literature, condemning it to be forever fixed in meaning

Jean Paul Sartre believed that those who appropriated literature for temporal, dogmatic purposes debased it. This might be another claim that Slattery has hurled at English teachers, and those who have written (or rewritten) English curricula in states such as Tasmania and Queensland over the last few years as a result of whole-sale pedagogical shifts in how learning is constructed and monitored. But this sentiment of Sartre’s can equally be used against Slattery. By undermining attempts to encourage students to engage with the myriad possibilities that a text affords, surely he is also debasing Literature, condemning it to be forever fixed in meaning, thus disenfranchising new generations of readers, eager for the thrill of the intellectual chase. One of the tenets of Critical Literacy is that texts are not a fixed entity, and nor are they ideologically neutral.

Let me provide a personal example, and yes, it’s from a Dead White Male. The Old Man and the Sea is arguably one of the most powerful novels of the 20th Century. It is a singular representation of Ernest Hemingway’s gifts as a novelist, for the poetic sparsity of the language, the economic style of the narrative, the symbolism, the imagery, the despair, the irony. Like so many good short books — Chronicle of a Death Foretold is another example — it packs immense richness into its slim dimensions. It is, not surprisingly, a product of Hemingway’s world view, in which man often pitted himself against beast and sometimes man prevailed, sometimes he didn’t. When I consider how I reacted to this book when I first read it, and how I consider it now, though, something strange happens. I first read it in my teens, because I wanted to rather than because I had to, and it struck me then as merely a good yarn. Given that my skills of criticism were perhaps underdeveloped at that stage, I missed a lot of the finer gifts that subsequent readings have yielded. I have also come to a clear realisation of what this novel is for me: a meditation on fatherhood. “I may not be the strongest person in the world,” the Old Man says at one stage. “But I know a few tricks, and I have resolution.”

Admittedly, my father is a crayfisherman, and regularly pits himself against the elements in order to make his living. So it may be that my reading of the novel is perhaps tainted by circumstance.

But my point is this, and this is why Slattery gets it all so horribly wrong: I doubt very much whether Hemingway was thinking much about fatherhood when he wrote the novel. He may have considered that he was in some way confronting his own sense of masculinity, but arguably that’s probably about it. (Other than that he wrote standing up, which I find interesting, I don’t pretend to be a scholarly expert on Hemingway’s oeuvre, either.) So how is it possible for this classic of the 20th Century literary canon to be interpreted in this way by me? Because, as a text, it contains ideas. And ideas will be interpreted according to the individual experiences, skills, passions, experiences, whims and histories of the Reader.

Here’s a bombshell: English teachers know this. Patronising intellectual bullies seem to have a spot of bother with the notion.

And what, perchance, are we to do with texts that are themselves post-modern in design and execution? Two examples: Gary Crew’s excellent novel for adolescent readers Strange Objects, which eschews a singular storyline in favour of the segmented storytelling provided by a collection of newspaper articles, diary entries, official reports and so on, left behind by a young man who is missing; and Anthony Browne’s simply fabulous picture book Voices in the Park, which tells the story of an apparently simple afternoon trip to the park from four different points of view, which each point of view afforded its own unique font, and with illustrations that add several layers of meaning to the story being told. Are teachers supposed to ignore the extent to which these two books (and I’m sure there are many other examples out there) experiment with notions of truth? Like so many masterful works of literature, there are myriad possibilities of meaning to be explored in these two books, and to choose one over another, as Slattery seems to be suggesting, is to reinforce one ideology, one paradigm, over another. Critical Literacy aims, at its core, to make multiple readings of a text possible.

Reducing complex issues to bland absolutes

Slattery falls into the neo-con trap, already alluded to, of taking some very complex issues surrounding the teaching of English, and indeed how English should be taught, and reducing them to bland absolutes. Students are having the pleasure of reading taken away from them. Post-modernism is being utilised for purposes for which it was never intended (as if Slattery is some kind of philosophical guardian, outraged at the supposed debasement of something he somehow considers his). His self-importance conveniently glosses over the fact that, increasingly, students must be given the skills and the confidence to interpret information that is presented to them. This information might take the form of prose, poetry, film, letters, diaries (those of Anne Frank are an excellent example, less a factual record and more an amalgam of constructed versions of fact, extensively edited into being so by her father after her death), journalism, opinion pieces, documentaries, and on and on it goes. Literature, with a capital ‘L’, is but one of the media by which students in English classes the nation over will be exposed to ideas and ideologies with which — and this is also important — they may not necessarily agree.

Slattery’s arguments seem to assume that students should simply be passive receivers of knowledge. That in a pedagogically sound classroom, teachers will enact the authoritative roles of a time past. This echoes the ‘dangerous intellectual nostalgia’ of which Kevin Donnelly is also guilty. Perhaps it is the way teaching ought to be done in John Howard’s utopian Australia, but it does not in any way represent the visceral reality of life in today’s classrooms. Classrooms where there is likely to be a diverse range of nationalities and ethnicities, manifested in a diversity of religious practices and the use of languages other then English. Classrooms that serve communities with a low socio-economic status, where the outcomes of schooling may be as much about intellectual preparedness as about fundamental survival in an increasingly hostile market-driven, consumer-oriented society. Classrooms that should thrive on openness and honesty and debate, and where every one of the thirty or so voices therein will have the opportunity to be heard. The recent attempts by Sophie Panopolous and Bronwyn Bishop to have Muslim girls banned from wearing headscarves at school is further proof that elements of our current federal government would seek to homogenise society: because in conservatism, there is safety.

It seems to be much too difficult for the likes of Slattery or Donnelly to realise that, in the enormous multitude of cases, teachers will be in the best position to judge a) what students need in order to grow and develop in the myriad ways that this is possible, and b) what they as professionals need to provide in order that this can become possible. This amounts to an argument in favour of the Integrity of the Teacher. This integrity is the one quality teachers have that is absent from any arguments put forward by either Slattery or Donnelly in pushing their respective agendas. Teaching does not, and should not, occur in a political, moral or social vacuum: sound pedagogy will be connected in some way to students’ life experiences, and for older students to their ambitions and goals for life beyond the end of compulsory schooling. To diminish the power base from which teachers should make decisions about what happens in their classrooms is to diminish the status and integrity of the teacher, which in turn suggests that teachers should not have either the facility or the right to choose how they teach what they teach.

This strikes me as an extremely dangerous and highly ideologically flawed position from which to pontificate about the wider professional and ideological rigours of teaching, and yet, repeatedly, Slattery and Donnelly are allowed open blather in the pages of a national newspaper to do exactly that. An educated mind, Aristotle said, is able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Given that this is the case, Donnelly and Slattery — and Keith Windschuttle, while I’m at it — could do with a lot more education.

© 2005 Cameron Hindrum

Cameron Hindrum lectures in Language and Literacy at the University of Tasmania.

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