An Attainable Version of High Literacy: Approaches to Teaching Higher-Order Skills in Reading and Writing

One way of criticizing contemporary literacy education is to credit it with trying to do the right things, but to argue that the means could stand improvement. With great variation in the amount and kind of improvement recommended, this seems to be the line of criticism taken by almost everyone from alarmist critics (e.g., Cooperman 1978; Flesch 1981) to blue-ribbon panelists (e.g., Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson 1985; National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). A quite different line of criticism, however, attacks the aim of contemporary literacy education, charging it with being oriented toward the development of a low form of literacy. In their historical analysis of literacy instruction. Resnick and Resnick (1977) identify high literacy and low literacy as distinct educational traditions. High literacy has been a tradition in education of the elites in Europe and America. It has been aimed at developing the linguistic and verbal reasoning abilities, the literary standards and sophistication, and the moral values and precepts appropriate to leaders of society. Mass education, however, according to Resnick and Resnick, grew out of a “low literacy” tradition of efforts to promote the minimum levels of reading needed for religious practice. In this article we shall not consider the merits of the high literacy tradition as it has actually unfolded. Rather, our concern is with what would be required in order to make high literacy of some sort attainable by the majority of students. The answer, we believe, does not lie in trying to make the common school into a copy of the elite academy. Rather, it lies in constructing new models of curriculum and instruction that can bring the benefits of high literacy to students who do not already come from highly literate backgrounds.