The other kids in class get what the teacher is explaining … you don ‘t. The other kids move on … you stay behind.
The other kids have prospects … you seem damned.
Failing at literacy affects over one-quarter* of New Zealanders. It brings that kind of quiet panic, a terror of not knowing what the teacher is talking about, a terror many of us have felt during the low points of our schooling. But what if that feeling of inferiority is sustained on a daily basis? Over many years, failing at literacy builds up and can turn to dejection, self-hatred and possibly an abyss of antisocial behaviours.
As he moves round the country, literacy campaigner Graham Crawshaw is constantly regaled with reports of young New Zealanders whose reading and comprehension is abysmal. He blames this country’s largely “whole language” system of teaching literacy, which has minimal use of phonics (the sounds words make) to help children decode words as they strike them. Crawshaw is no wimp. When he mentions principals who “graduate” illiterate pupils every year, the hands-on Northland farmer derisively compares the graduation of so many illiterate pupils to a world where Fisher and Paykel could get away with delivering one-in-fi ve of their washing machines without any electric motor inside.
But the next minute Crawshaw is asking how your kids are doing at school and recommending his upcoming book, which will concentrate on how parents can best teach literacy directly to their children. Aged 73, he is widely read, a winner of the
QSM, a strategic political lobbyist with a twinkle in his eye and a lifelong passion for education — especially educating the individuals too easily branded as hopeless. Hundreds of kids have attended Crawshaw’s Arapohue Reading Adventure Camps at
Warkworth, Tauranga, and at his farm at Arapohue, Dargaville. These boy-friendly camps -- with mudslides, bonfi res, bush craft and all-important literacy sessions -- can claim a dramatic turnaround in literacy age (as indicated by the Burt reading test) even after a few days at camp.
He himself he says is now getting too old to run the camps directly, but has far from given up on the Reading Adventure Camp vision he now looks for those to whom he can pass on the baton. As he swings a hammer and wields a skilsaw building new camp facilities, Crawshaw also spends hours writing out the procedures and details needed to keep the camps accessible and effective, and on a book to keep his dynamic philosophy out in the public domain long after he is personally out of the picture himself.
Crawshaw gets a lot of opposition for his views. One school principal confronted him, saying: “how dare you confuse children with phonics “I was sharply dismissed from the man’s offi ce,” recounts Crawshaw, “but all I was doing was asking if he would let parents know about the Reading Adventure Camps we were running during the holidays. However, in reply to a newspaper ad. two boys from the school came to camp and returned home able to read journals for the fi rst time. They returned to another camp, with two other boys from their school, whose word decoding skills also received a boost. Crawshaw heard later that all four boys were moved to a school which taught phonics properly. “Now I say ‘how dare you’ to any primary chool principal over the last half-century who allowed just one pupil to leave Standard 4 (Year 6) illiterate.” Yet Crawshaw says his real quarrel is not with principals and teachers, who for the most part have not been taught adequately how to teach phonic themselves. According to him the rot began in 1950 when Peter Fraser appointed as director of education Clarence Beeby, who dismantled the phonics-based education
system New Zealand had up until that point. The effects have been as cruel as they have been far-reaching, says Crawshaw, who claims it was virtually unknown pre-1950 for a New Zealand child to leave school illiterate. Recent surveys, however, have put today’s rate of “functional illiteracy”* as high as onethird or more of young New Zealanders. Crawshaw says that “up to thirty percent” of the inmates of New Zealand jails are illiterate, and often says he would like to meet prisoners and apologise to them for not being taught to read. “When anyone is arrested, test their reading as well as taking their fi ngerprints.” He would like to know if the person arrested can write a letter; what is the extent of their vocabulary; can they hold a sensible conversation; and could they read a book like The Power of One? “If the answer to all these questions is negative, immediate steps should be taken to trace
the primary schools attended between ages fi ve to eight — their very critical years when literacy skills should have been established, but weren’t.”
Crawshaw tells of sitting outside a Northland court on court day and testing reading as people came and went. A man who stuck in his mind told him that he could not read, and pointed to a nearby primary school from where he had “graduated” some years earlier. Just then a prisoner was led up the path in handcuffs and the man told Crawshaw that he was there to support him, “and he can’t read either.” Crawshaw says the situation is tragic and unnecessary. He intends to concentrate his future energies directly towards parents, to get them teaching their children to be fully literate. “I believe learning to read is the single most important
skill anyone acquires. But everyone learns to speak their own language without a school in sight, just from their most important teachers, their parents.”
Paul Charman is an Auckland journalist and a colleague of literacy campaigner
Graham Crawshaw. He will be writing regularly for The Free Radical on Graham
Crawshaw’s ongoing work with literacy for young New Zealanders. Send him
mail at paul.charman@snl.co.nz.
NB: The 1996 Adult Literacy in New Zealand
survey of adults from 16-65 ranked reading
levels from level 1 (very poor) to level 5 (very
good); level 3 is regarded as being “functionally
literate,” ie., the minimum level required to
meet the “complex demands of everyday life
and work.” The survey found that for prose
(the “ability to understand and use information
from text”) a staggering 66.4 percent of Mäori
were below this minimum level and an equally
tragic 41.6 percent of non-Mäori.
By Paul Charman
Published by The Free Radical Magazine
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