Ilana Snyder, an associate professor in Monash University’s Education Faculty, writes in The Literacy Wars of Paulo Freire speaking in Fitzroy Town Hall in the 1970s. I remember him too. In 1974 he spoke in a University of Melbourne lecture theatre crammed with Diploma of Education students. Snyder was ahead of my class of 1974: by then she was teaching English. Like her, I was impressed with Freire’s humour and humanity, especially when he told us, disarmingly, that the language he had to write in was ‘crap’. He said that the educational authorities wouldn’t take him seriously if he didn’t shroud his simple insights with academic jargon. We applauded: he wasn’t doctrinaire, he was for liberation; he wanted to help people use the tools of language to name their world in their own terms.
The Literacy Wars: Why teaching children to read and write is a battleground in Australia by Ilana Snyder by Ilana Snyder
Allen & Unwin, $32.95 pb, 248 pp
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