William Davies puts the literacy crisis on a longer clock than smartphones or ChatGPT. Schools had spent decades teaching students to treat language as a task with a correct answer. Automated writing arrived in a culture already anxious about using the right words.
- Drawing on education scholar Gert Biesta, Davies traces the shift from education toward individual, measurable “learning” through the 1980s and 1990s.
- Literacy tests reward the ability to use information to accomplish goals. Literary interpretation, invention, and pleasure fit awkwardly into that framework.
- His lockdown teaching and university plagiarism cases exposed a shared fear: writing felt like a series of traps, with rules students needed to discover before beginning.
- The intellectual history reaches back to cybernetics and information theory in the 1940s. Davies follows their connections to cognitive science and structuralism, the study of relationships within systems of signs.
- Bernard Geoghegan’s Code and Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines complicate any easy opposition between a humanistic past and a computational present.
Davies also questions the defense of reading as inherently valuable because it is difficult. Difficulty alone leaves the classroom’s fixation on correctness intact. His alternative is room for play, uncertainty, poetry, and intriguing mistakes.
Students should have the freedom to put words in an unexpected order and find out what happens. That freedom gives English classes a purpose beyond supplying dependable workers for the knowledge economy.