Literacy, the Basics, and All That Jazz

Abstract

WHILE Newsweek's cover story on Why Johnny Gan't Write (December 5, 1975) has been roundly criticized within the profession, it is nevertheless important to realize that the media have promoted a back-to-basics movement in recent years by glibly inferring similarities where there are important differences. A typical composite of such reasoning goes like this: The City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of California have in recent years made extensive efforts at what in both instances is called remediation in English. Moreover, the instructors at both universities are concerned with errors in students' writing, and these errors fall into similar categories: spelling, punctuation, grammar, and the conventional subcategories. No doubt if these are the problems at two of the largest university systems in the country, similar problems must exist in the writing of other entering college students throughout the country. Thus the media infer a need for the basics, using these and similar examples. While the statements leading up to the inference are true as worded, it is simply fanciful to believe that the students in Berkeley's much-publicized Subject A have the same writing problems as the open admissions students in Basic Writing 1 at The City College of CUNY. To so believe is to create an illusion based only on similarities of categories of errors. To build a back-to-basics movement on those kinds of comparisons is to build a shaky movement. In a slightly different but related vein, there are those who note with alarm that standardized test scores of college aspirants have declined in recent years and that college teachers have been steadily more shocked by the overall literacy levels of new students (not just deficiencies in the so-called basics). On the other hand, some people argue that because we live in a time when reading and writing are not as important as they once were as communications media, we don't need to concern ourselves with teaching reading and writing as much as we once did. Of course this position, not inadvertently, contributes to the alarm of those who fear a decline in literacy and adds to the fervor of those who seek a renewed emphasis on the basics. To filter out the merits of the basics movement and the concerns over literacy, we need to discuss how language and literacy work. This should better enable us to understand why literacy is still important and give us a framework for deciding what is essential in teaching reading and writing.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.