Not Fit for Purpose: The National Strategies for Literacy Considered as an Endeavour of Government

Since 1998 there has been an ambitious attempt to raise standards of literacy in English schools through national strategies targeted at primary schools and at Key Stage 3 in secondary schools. This article views this initiative as a governmental enterprise aimed at forming the capacities and reshaping the understandings of teachers and their pupils in order to produce the citizenry required by a modern nation-state. It is argued that this endeavour has been vitiated by a guiding rationality that is undemocratic and impatient of scholarly process. The national strategies are ill fitted to the task of forming individuals capable of sustaining and enhancing democratic society in a period of cultural and communal plurality. This article attempts to clear some of the ground for considering how such an educational and governmental task might be more appropriately addressed.