Popular Education and Mass Literacy Campaigns: Beyond 'New Literacy Studies'

In Australia and internationally, politicians and policy makers continue to believe in a direct and unproblematic relationship between literacy on the one hand and a wide range of social benefits on the other. As literacy advocates and practitioners, we are reluctant to argue with this, because it helps our case for more funding and support. On the other hand, most practitioners also know that there have been several decades of academic research and writing now which have seriously questioned the nature of these links. Some researchers associated with 'New Literacy Studies' (NLS) have been particularly influential in problematising the Freirian concept of the link between literacy and social transformation (Rogers, 2011; Street, 2001). In this chapter, I will argue that there are significant problems with the NLS approach. In the first instance, its dismissal of the emancipatory narrative of popular education relies too much on post-structuralist theory and ethnographic methodology, while paying scant attention to the ongoing political economy of adult education and development in the Global South (Lambirth, 2011; Youngman, 2000). Second, and related to this, the NLS critique has, perhaps unwittingly, strengthened the neoliberal argument against large-scale state- and social movement-led adult literacy campaigns. I will use historical analysis and contemporary examples to demonstrate that, in the right context, mass literacy campaigns can indeed be socially transformative, just as Paulo Freire and many other twentieth century popular education theorists believed (Freire & Macedo, 1987).