Great article in this month’s Literacy Link from ACAL. Steve Goldberg writes about his work running the national Reading Writing Hotline over the last seven years. He’s always inundated with requests for radio interviews, occasionally from shock-jocks who try to make him say that the education system is cracking up, and urge him to name the blameworthy.
i love the way Steve tells his story .. these interviews are his favourite, because he gets to challenge all the “loaded assumptions about adult literacy”. And then he’ll tell some real life stories about people who had some bad luck in their early lives.
Like the man who realised in his thirties that all the labels – ‘lazy’, ‘uncooperative’ and ‘dyslexic’ – came about because he’d been living with post-traumatic stress disorder most of his schooling life. Witnessing his friend killed on a school crossing at age seven had blocked his ability to learn.
“There was nothing wrong with me. My writing and spelling problems all boiled down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Reminds me of the woman who grew up in an institution run by nuns. They thought because she was deaf in one ear that she was too stupid to learn. So they never taught her to read or write.
Sixty-five years later, after a couple of years in our adult literacy program, she ended up reading her poem about that experience, to the Victorian state parliament during their inquiry into that institution. This was a very talented and insightful woman, held back for years by other people’s prejudices.
(ACAL is the Australian Council for Adult Literacy – acal.edu.au/