Why Read when you can Riot?
Please read my musings above on this article…
This article titled “Read all about it: Britain’s shameful literacy crisis” was written by Deborah Orr, for The Guardian on Wednesday 26th October 2011 19.30 UTCIn the immediate wake of the riots, much was made of a particularly telling detail of the huge disturbance that took place in London’s Clapham Junction. Nearly all of the shops on that stretch of road were attacked. Many were broken into. Some were stripped bare. A shop that sold party accessories and donated part of its profit each year to worldwide children’s charities was set ablaze and gutted. One shop, however, was untouched – a bookshop.
Simon, the manager of Black’s, the camping shop across the road, told the London Evening Standard’s David Cohen: “They smashed our window, ripped the plasma TVs off our walls, took all our jackets and rucksacks. I saw them go into Claire’s Accessories, break into NatWest, liberate our neighbours Toni & Guy of hair products. They carted off iPods from Currys, clothes from Debenhams, mobile phones from Carphone Warehouse. I was horrified. But Waterstone’s, directly opposite us, was untouched. For the looters it was as if it did not exist.”
At the time, I thought that this observation was bang-on. Because I never use betting shops, or print shops, I simply don’t see them. Bookshops, I always notice, because I love reading. Bookies are a different matter, because I never go into one and place a bet.
Those rioters at Clapham Junction, to generalise, probably didn’t even see Waterstone’s. Bookshops don’t even register, because they offer nothing that is wanted. To me, that seems like a miserable omission from a life, and an ignominious, debilitating exclusion from a civilised culture.
On Twitter, however, a comment suggesting that if the rioters had nicked a few books they “might learn something” was retweeted time and time again, for days, as if it was the acme of wit. There seemed to be little understanding that the tweet was cruel, superior, patronising; that it mocked the afflicted and blamed the victims of an education system that left swaths of people not just unable to read, but unable even to register the existence of a shop that sold literature. Failure on that scale is not individual. It is systemic.
This week’s report from the Ministry of Justice rejects the government’s theory that gang membership lay at the root of the riots. Background analysis suggests instead that the predominant feature of the rioters was something else. Among young people arrested during the riots, more than two-thirds were classed as having special educational needs and one third had been excluded from school in the past year. Just as our prisons teem with people who cannot read properly, so for those terrible nights did the streets of our cities.
The tragedy is worsened by the fact that Britain has finally had its longstanding difficulties with literacy rubbed in its face just as the money to tackle the problem is ebbing away. I feel so angry that this failure has been ignored or denied for such a long time, even though it has been apparent for many years. The left, on the whole, has spent the last decade excusing an education system that lets down the people whom it is supposed to care for most. Even now, much rhetoric suggests – wrongly – that all is well, apart from the withdrawal of educational maintenance allowance, and the establishment of a few “free schools”.
I became aware of the state system’s problems with teaching literacy when my own son, and a number of his friends, were not learning to read and write at primary school, but were instead becoming hostile to reading and writing, in a school setting that saw this as unremarkable and untroubling. Looking into the matter further, I found great cause for concern.
On international comparisons, British literacy rates were remarkably poor, and were declining rather than improving. The Daily Mail was splashing critical headlines about the same subject, and the whole thing was dismissed on the left as rightwing “scaremongering”.
In 2006, I suggested in the Independent that one secondary in my locale, whose boast was that “47% of pupils passed five GCSEs at A* to C”, could be more accurately described as churning out 53% of pupils who were “functionally illiterate”. Peter Wilby, in the New Statesman, dismissed this as “a preposterous statement” with “no basis in knowledge” and “daft”. The pass rate I quoted, he argued, was the same as that at his own grammar school, 45 years before.
Wilby’s own assertion, that an inner-city comprehensive on special measures was performing to the same standard as a grammar school, half a century ago, seemed much more preposterous to me. It was also considerably more dangerous in its own complacency than mine was in its despairing and urgent hyperbole.
Yet, the complacency continued. As recently as 2009, Edward Leigh, of the public accounts committee (PAC), produced a damning report on literacy in England, which was rebutted forcefully. Leigh told the BBC that “anyone who believed the government could meet its target of 95% adult literacy and numeracy was living in cloud cuckoo land”. This, when “even doing so would only bring England to the level currently achieved by the top 25% of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries”.
In response to the PAC report, Barry Sheerman, Labour chairman of the Commons’ schools select committee, said it was a “thin piece of work”, based on little evidence. “To make sweeping generalisations about adult literacy and numeracy,” he added, “does a disservice to everyone, learners and teachers, across the country.”
At that time, the Labour government was still insisting that primary schools were fine. Any problems in the system started at secondary school, and academies were there to sort that out.
We’re not much further forward now, although at last it is acknowledged that far too many children start secondary education with their primary education very much incomplete. And now, here we are, living in a country that can muster whole gangs of people who don’t even appear to register the existence of bookshops, let alone consider books to be objects worth stealing.
Yet the parliamentary opposition feels it can truthfully insist that this is the consequence of cuts that were announced months rather than years before the riots occurred. Labour has said sorry for a number of mistakes it made during its time in opposition. It would do well to apologise for its inadequate and blustering denials of the depth of Britain’s literacy crisis as well, and start coming up with some plans that would decisively address this baleful problem. I’d certainly be glad to mark my cross against that.
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