Overview

Why literacies?

Literacies and opportunity

Why ‘literacies’? Or even more fundamentally, why education – in which literacy is considered to be one of the ‘basics’?

Education provides access to opportunities in the form of better-paid employment , an improved chance to participate in civic life and personal growth. It also promises deeper understandings of the world, enabling people to do more for themselves and make a contribution to the lives of others. Literacies are central to these fundamental educational objectives.

Education is a key site of social opportunity, even if the scales of opportunity are often unevenly balanced. Equity is a value that matters in a fair society, a principle that requires equivalent opportunities to be available to all, irrespective of their social origins or cultural background. A more ambitious goal of education may be for it to contribute to greater equality. Sometimes, all that it seems to achieve is an ongoing struggle to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots – hence, for example, the compensatory literacy programs, the remedial reading programs for children who have been ‘left behind’ and the special efforts made in schools in poor neighbourhoods.