Literacy and English Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Literacy and English Literature in the Twenty-first Century

Throughout much of human history, roughly one hundred thousand years or so, little changed. Humans were hunter-gatherers who slowly spread out from sub-Sahara Africa to occupy faraway lands, where they learned to survive in different and challenging environments. It was only five thousand years ago, with the advent of farming and writing, that civilization as we know it came into existence. Societies formed, empires were built, new technologies were invented, wars were fought, lost, and won. During this relatively short period of time, the human paradigm changed dramatically—yet nothing on the scale of what occurred in the twentieth century. Nineteen fifties America would be fundamentally alien to a Chinese emperor in the Xia dynasty, or even to an Elizabethan merchant. Even so, no period of the twentieth century can compare to the near exponential change that has occurred across the globe in the last two decades, thanks largely to digital communications and internet technologies. At the forefront of this information revolution are companies such as Apple Inc. and Google—companies led by visionaries who understand new medias, who champion critical thought and creative freedom, who engage with real-world issues and constantly challenge the status quo. These are the type of men and women Australia’s education system should endeavor to foster and produce. However, to create this next generation of leaders and doers, new approaches toward literacy must be adopted in the classrooms across the country, namely phasing out the didactic literary pedagogy in favor of a more progressive, flexible, and critical one that can rise to meet the needs of the new, savvy, participatory learners in the multimodal society of the twenty-first century.

To begin, the inherent problem with the didactic literary pedagogy is that it’s five hundred years old, having come into practice about the same time the printing press was...