Perhaps, we'll put it that way.
What I want to do is I want to make a kind of a contrast between what
literacy originally was in the first phases of mastery education
compared to the objectives of literacy today, the work place and
employment objectives of literacy.
And the case I'm going to make is in fact that it's quite different these days.
Let's do a little thumb nail sketch of modern work
at the point which mass institutionalized education was created.
And don't forget, mass institutionalized education's quite new.
It's really a phenomenon of the 19th century and it was until the 20th century
that nearly everybody in the whole world has a child that went to school.
Okay, so in that first time what was the classical objectives in terms of work.
Let's take an example like Henry Ford's motor car factory.
This was a typical factory, a typical workplace in the industrial era.
And in fact, that work place was designed around absolutely
minimal skills, workplace skills and minimal literacy.
So, you are on a production line, where an engineer divided up
all the production processes into tiny little bits.
So, there you are, you are screwing this bolt on and the next person screwed
the next bolt on, as the car went along the production line and
by the time it have been passed I don't know,
a thousand workers, the whole thing had been dissembled.
Now, in fact, the literacy skills in the kind of environment were really minimal.
So, in fact, what schools needed to produce for
a majority of the population was not much at all.
Perhaps read a danger sign, or read a notice.
Very, very, very minima.
So in a way what we call the old basics were a minimal set of
basic skills for getting around in this kind of work place and
there was a very, very small elite which were the supervisors and
the bosses and the engineers who might have gone onto the higher education, and
who might need higher level of literacy skills.
But in fact the whole system was based around not very high literacy skills for
majority of the people who came out at the end.
Now what was really important was not literally the skills of literacy, but
the skill of turning up to school on time, behaving yourself,
doing as you're told the discipline of the classroom
became very much like the discipline of the factory.
Punctuality, reliability, doing as you're told.
If the teachers at the front say do this, give the right answer, don't talk back.
So there was a whole kind of disciplinary practices which were learnt in
the early modern schools, which sort of aligned with these kinds of work places.
So it didn't really matter how much you learned as long as you were a well behaved
person who prepared to operate effectively when the boss told you something,
or the supervisor ordered you to do something and so on.
So that's really a little, a very,
very sort of simple thumb nail sketch of the kind of literacy skills and
the kind of literacy that was designed for these kinds of work places.
Now what have we got today?
Well, in fact, things have changed a lot.
Classically now,
if you work even in a car factory, what you're doing is much more complex.
You might be a member of a team, you might have to be multi-skilled,
you might have to do problem solving and troubleshooting, quality control,
whatever, so the literacy skills are much higher including.
Probably a little of screen skills a lot of the time as well.
So entering data on the screen,
looking at what's happening on a computer screen, and so on.
So, very different set of literacy skills.
But also, a different set of dispositions.
So ideally in this kind of modern workplace, which is often by the way,
called the post Fordist workplace as a contrast to the Fordist workplace.
Well, in these kind of workplaces, you know, we want people,
ideally, who are critical thinkers, problem solvers,
people who take initiative, people who work collaboratively in teams.
So it's a different kind of literacy skills.
But also a different kind of set of sensibilities
which fit with this new kind of workplace.
Now, this kind of workplace is often called the workplace of the new economy.
The knowledge economy.
And of course there's a lot of employment, not just in factories,
I'm talking about the changes that might be happening in a factory.
But a lot of employment in service industries.