Hello,
I don't know whether this information is helpful but thought I'd throw it out
for those who are interested in pursuing this further.
The attack on education is couched as an attack on critical literacy, although
previous posters have pointed out that there are bigger issues at stake and I
suspect that critical literacy is simply a convenient hook for hanging a very
big hat. As those of us in education know, one of the most powerful rallying
cries for inciting moral panic is to say, "We must protect our children", so
framing this larger attack around the perversion of kids in school was a smart
tactic in this war.
Critical literacy is, of course, simply the claim that texts are not
disinterested and that kids can learn to identify some of the power relations
one finds in the text. Often this is done in a sort of "identify the
stereotypes" kind of way and has largely to do with representation of
identities. Obviously the conflation of this approach with Foucault is silly,
but accuracy hardly seems to be the point of the article. I suppose that the
success and prominence of media literacy in Australia is probably one of the
targets of this attack, as media literacy is generally tossed into
the "dumbing down of the curriculum" argument. Of course there are arguments
within the literacy world between those who take a more sort of Marxist or
Frankfurt interventionist view on literacy and media studies and those who do
skeptical genealogies of how we have come to view education as primarily an
intervention into the lives of children.
My understanding is that critical literacy is at least somewhat prominent in
Australian education, certainly more so than in the US for example. In most
literacy education programs in colleges of education in the US, you will find
proponents of critical literacy but I suspect many feel they have very limited
effect as in the US the dominant mode in education is the deprofessionalize
teachers to such an extent that they are frightened of doing anything that
could be construed as controversial.
A final comment is that I've heard that the Australian Alan Luke, who is
arguably currently the most prominent literacy theorist in the world working
through a Foucaldian lens, has left Singapore where he worked for several
years and returned to Australia. Anyone seriously interested in pursuing this
editorial further might do well to contact Dr. Luke for his insight and
collaboration.
Gail