Opinion
Our kids aren’t failing NAPLAN. NAPLAN is failing our AutoCorrected kids
Malcolm Knox
Journalist, author and columnistIf education were a commercial enterprise preparing new herds of customers, Australia’s NAPLAN results would not show one-third of students “failing at” or “struggling with” literacy and numeracy. The operation would be a success.
If education were a market research trial of new technologies, we would not be describing the feedback from this cohort as “disastrous” and “alarming”. Why learn to write when artificial intelligence – in its most basic forms, AutoCorrect and spell check – can do it for you?
Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:
Gross underinvestment in education, aggravated by Commonwealth-state funding deadlocks, is achieving a perfect neoliberal outcome: new generations of consumers entering the market with diminished ability to think independently. Markets want certainty, conformity and insecurity – adding up to brand loyalty – and an underfunded education system is giving them just that. If the aim is to stop coming generations from opening their eyes to how their planet is being killed, their critical skills are being duly eroded.
There are two standout conclusions from NAPLAN. One, literacy and numeracy have declined steadily since 2008. Two, inequality – measured by correlating students’ results with their parents’ education level – has become more entrenched. The harvest, for a market economy that thrives on automatism, is getting better by the year.
Because of limited space, I’ll focus on literacy. The written word is undergoing an explosion of usage, thanks to digital devices and the preference for text over spoken conversation. More people are writing more words than at any time in history. Those students who are writing so prolifically are also in a state of revolution, IMHO, against those same fkn words. WTAF? IDK.
Language is a living thing, and no rule should be immutable. Dr Johnson built his dictionary of English to chart its movement, not to embalm it. Rules are only temporary, and the users will eventually conquer the lawmakers.
That’s inevitable, but learning literacy is not about pinning words into a glass case like dead butterflies. It’s about understanding the dynamism of English so you can play with it. Creativity is about bending, breaking, and blowing up rules, but you can’t break something when you don’t know what it is. If nothing can be serious, then nothing can be funny. (As the Major said to Basil Fawlty, “Why do we bother?” And as Fawlty muttered back, “I didn’t know you did.”)
If users are moving on from literacy, why do we bother?
Speaking as a rigorous – and, I’m told, rigorously annoying – stickler, I see basic literacy first of all as necessary for life. People who can’t read instructions on medicine bottles or auto manuals come out of school dangerously unprepared, for their own and others’ safety.
Literacy is also a sign of self-respect, like not walking around with your fly unzipped or bits of food stuck to your face. Intentionally defying standardised literacy can be creative, but deficient literacy, on the other hand, is a brake on social mobility.
Agreed rules of literacy smooth the path to communication. If you want to be understood, write something that the receiver doesn’t have to read three times. There’s a productivity component to clean writing. Anyone who writes for their work – from emails to reports to beautifully turned-out newspaper columns that sometimes need to be read three times (guilty!) – harms productivity when they need to be corrected. Why create extra work for others? (Which is an argument, by the way, for writing generated by a sufficiently advanced AI replicant, as long as it hasn’t stolen real creators’ language, in which case they have to be recompensed.)
Most importantly, literacy has real-world power. When Greta Thunberg said “Blah blah blah” to world leaders at the Youth4Climate summit, she was speaking truth to power. Naomi Klein (not to be confused with Naomi Wolf), in her brilliant 2023 book Doppelganger, wrote that the polarised forces that are eating up global politics share “a baseline war on words and meaning”.
Donald Trump’s flagrant disregard for all words and meaning is an expression of this hostility to literacy, but so are Kamala Harris’ eloquent statements upon which she has no intention of acting. Klein paraphrases Hannah Arendt on the rise of totalitarianism: “If nothing means anything and nothing follows from anything else, then anything is possible.” Words can be weapons, but words that are stripped of meaning, that mock meaning itself, lay the ground for the worst imaginable abuses. This is, or was, what the 20th century taught us about literacy.
But what if conservators of literacy are wrong, or hopelessly out of date? What if artificial intelligence is superseding literacy and numeracy? Lynne Truss, in her 2004 bestseller Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, wrote, “The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.”
What if she was doing the equivalent of arguing for cufflinks and tie pins? Truss was taking a thin-end-of-the-wedge approach. Today it’s the removal of apostrophes from street signs (a lively debate in Britain in 2024), tomorrow it’s the wholesale replacement of words with emojis, and the day after that it’s the end of civilisation. What if this is just alarmism from the language-embalmers?
I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s a reminder to question the assumptions we bring to any argument.
What I do see is students’ thumbs hopping across their phones more nimbly than an Olympic breakdancer, producing a new kind of literacy that is fast overtaking the old. School, for a majority, is the only place in their lives where they are asked to obey “proper” spelling, grammar and punctuation (and the only place where they will be asked to use more than very basic maths). In their declining NAPLAN results, many are not “failing” literacy and numeracy but openly rejecting what is to them an irrelevant rule book. Where did their school libraries go? Where are the teacher-librarians? Irrelevant. Defunded.
But if they are jumping out of the frying pan of standard literacy and numeracy, what is the fire they are jumping into? It is a blaze that has already got most of them. Outside the classroom, they have already entered the self-reinforcing digital environment of algorithms that give them more of the content they have previously demanded and advertising targeting the data they have unwittingly surrendered. Give up on literacy and numeracy, and they will find a line-up of Zuckerbergs and Musks waiting with open arms.
Literacy and numeracy results aren’t critical in themselves, but they are leading indicators for whether students are being prepared for adult life; whether they will think independently and avoid the gravitational pull of commercial and political servitude. A functional education opens the way for students to be free-thinking, aware, inquisitive, empathetic participants in a community.
On the other hand, if our education system’s purpose is to turn students into passive consumers and mindless followers, then it is doing better each year. The forces of conformity have got them where they want them. Little wonder that there is such scarce political commitment to fund education as our top priority.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.
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