Skills for life
David Puttnam

 
Reading and writing are not enough.

Few will deny the importance of literacy. It's the motherhood and apple-pie of education. The curriculum is and always has been an arena for confrontation, religious, political and cultural. However, literacy remains the fixed point around which the argument swirls. We may debate endlessly over the teaching of evolution or which version of history to tell. We may argue that literature or science has no place in primary education. But there's no argument about whether children should learn to master the written language in which these debates take place.

The reason for this particular consensus is fairly obvious: unless we are literate, we have limited access to range and depth of human knowledge. And, of course, it's not only the higher order of knowledge that illiteracy bars us from.  It is as much the every day and the banal; when the bus is coming, what's on TV.

Literacy is not, however, as simple a thing as this overriding consensus would suggest. If being literate is best understood as being fully operational in the society in which we are found, then our notion of what literacy is, is likely to change along with that society. When the only requirement was to read the odd signpost just sounding out letters was probably fine, but when we are expected to digest the full flow of written and pictorial information that the Internet provides we need to be equipped with a significantly higher order of skills. Our notion of what it is to be fully prepared for life has grown to encompass skills other than "just reading".

To give an example of what this might mean, consider that medium with which I am most at home, the visual media. Such is the pervasiveness of TV and film that an inability to deal with moving images in an intelligent way is truly disabling. It might seem that there is nothing particularly difficult in absorbing TV, and in a way that's the point. It is the very ease that makes awareness so vital. It is all too easy to be manipulated by such a powerful medium. It is not just a healthy cynicism that's required to get the most out of the stream of moving images. We need to be literate in all forms of media. We need to understand how its tricks work in order to get inside it and sort the wheat from the chaff.

One of the problems with this type of media is the sheer volume of material with which we are presented. This is even more true of the new media, most especially the Internet. Given this mass of information we need to give everyone the skills necessary to understand and pick through it. Lots of these skills will be no different from those needed to do research in a library. The difference is that we all need to have them. Analysing these different formats, and the impact their methods can have on meaning will, in my judgement, become increasingly crucial to the concept of literacy (and possibly even liberty) as the century progresses.

However, we must not allow ourselves to see the impact of the computer on education as merely akin to the impact of the calculator on arithmetic: speeding up and simplifying the process without offering any significant change to the process itself. If these technologies are sensitively and intelligently used, they have the potential to influence the whole development of the educational process - and with it, our collective futures.

We will develop genuinely new skills, such as those required to use computers to navigate the web. These skills will rapidly approach the status of necessities, as without them it will become difficult to fully participate in society. Hence the genuinely literate person of this new century will have a facility with computers and visual images undreamed of in the last.

We are therefore asking our educators to do more than has been asked of any of their predecessors. We are asking teachers to provide our children with many of the old skills to a higher level than ever before. We are also asking them to give us new skills for a new world. It is wrong to underestimate the enormity of this expectation. Absorbing this degree of change, this kind of leap in demand, would be difficult for any profession and, without the support of society in general, is quite likely to prove impossible.

The Internet was supposed to herald a new era of access, of enlightenment, of freedom of information. If this is to be the case, then we cannot sit and carp at teachers from the sidelines. Instead we must realise that it is only through fully supporting them and recognising their achievements that we, as a nation, can truly address the issue of literacy in the 21st Century.
 

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