Seeing like a state: Literacy and language standards in schools

Abstract The release of the last Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) report in December 2017 was a moment of public alarm in South Africa. The study tested a selection of Grade 4 children across the country in 2016 and compared their results to 50 other countries and found that “78% of Grade 4s in SA cannot read for meaning", compared with only 4% of children across the 50 countries. But there are problems with these tests and what they can tell us. Literacy and language are simplified and compacted constructs in these exercises, streamlined for administration and for measurement. While purporting to test children's individual literacy skills, such tests are more examinations of whether the children's experiences of schooling match the unexamined or unstated assumptions of the tester as to how schooling is done. They work with greatly limited constructs of both literacy and language and are neither sensitive enough nor grounded enough in actual classroom literacy practices to be of use as a basis for intervening in schools. Their construct of literacy as a unitary, portable and readily testable property of individuals and of standard languages as corresponding to the construct of children's ‘mother tongues’ are examples of state administrative strategies, or of ‘seeing like a state’, where a reductive administrative grid is placed over situated, complex communicative activity. Such simplifications are like abridged maps in that they simplify and distort what is being observed.