Securing the Development of the Literate Child

Since the time of Periclean democracy, the child has been considered as an object of government. Plato (Reference Jowett1892a) thought that ‘the young of all creatures cannot be quiet in their bodies or in their voices’ (p. 31) and having not yet acquired ‘his own proper sense’ that they rage and roar ‘without rhyme or reason’ (p. 52). Plato (Reference Jowett1892b) sees the child's seeming inability to ‘attain the use of reason’ until later in their life, ‘if at all’ (p. 133), as both a problem of development and a concern for the stability of the state. For Plato, the conduct of children is a matter of legal intervention where the teacher has a role in administering appropriate narratives that will shape children's souls. The stories children are first taught should be ‘models of virtuous thought’ (Plato, Reference Jowett1892b, p. 61). Whilst children are considered to be a risk, the makers and teachers of stories are also held responsible so that ‘the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction’ (Plato, Reference Jowett1892b, p. 59). For Plato, the child is an impressionable tender thing whose character is still being formed. To carelessly allow children to hear inappropriate tales might damage the formation of values ‘we would wish them to have when they are grown up’ (Plato, Reference Jowett1892b, p. 59).

For Plato, children are a natural resource to be shaped for the good of the state. This is a task to be taken seriously, regulated and not left in the hands of un-administered teachers and poets. In this sense, the legislated curriculum makes students subject before the law. It is through a curriculum administered by magistrates that children learn their responsibility to the sovereignty of the state. For the good of the state, the child ‘must be bound with many bridles’ by the legislator and ‘guardian of law, who is the director of education’ (Plato, Reference Jowett1892a, p. 190). This legislator must guard against children disrupting tradition and making innovations in their games. The child who does so may come to desire a ‘different sort of life’ and ‘other institutions and laws’ (Plato, Reference Jowett1892a, p. 179). These desires, suggests Plato (Reference Jowett1892a), are the ‘greatest of evils to [the] state’ (p. 179). Such a threat to the state demands that controls be placed on poets and teachers and that the state intervene in the life of families whereby ‘pupils shall be regarded as belonging to the state’ (Plato, Reference Jowett1892a, p. 186). Here, we can see that children's literacy practices are bound to the education of values, obligations of citizenship, and duty to the powers of sovereign government. Baker (Reference Baker2003) suggests that the fabrication of an ‘ideal polis can not be disarticulated from ideal rearing practices’ where the ‘figure of the child’ is deployed as ‘tool, problem and possibility’ (p. 464). The intersection between education, the literacies permitted to be taught, and learning the practice of being lawful are considered as a model for governing the child's chaotic nature for an ordered and civilised body politic. This Platonic view spells out the dangers of unbridled nature, but defers the responsibilities of political life until adulthood.

Similarly, since the Enlightenment, classical liberalism's key protagonists have represented the child as not yet ready to engage fully in political life (Baker, Reference Baker2001). Despite their political differences, the production of the literate and literary mind as civil citizen was a concept common to Hobbes, Locke, Ferguson, and Smith. Ferguson (Reference Ferguson1767), for example, suggests that a literary education is useful for protecting against indolence by extending the capability and conduct of young men to perform skills and vigorously pursue ‘the objects of policy, and in finding the expedients of war and national defence’ (p. 25). For Ferguson, the foundations of a civil society are based on an educable body that secure the ‘increase and industry’ of society (Reference Ferguson1767, p. 105). Similarly for Smith (1763/Reference Smith1982), the protection against ‘barbarians and savages’ could be secured through the utility of possessing the liberal arts of writing and arithmetic necessary for the production of life and good government:

Ferguson and Smith premised the constitution of such a subject in a liberal political economy on a division in the access to forms of knowledge and the production of labour. The constitution of a secure, civil society was conceived, in part, to be dependent on a differentiated distribution of education and literacy. The formation of literate subjects was also seen by Ferguson to constitute a soldier-like citizen deployed in the interests of the state. Similarly, Smith thought that if each class was to be educated to a level as required by the needs of the state, it was: (a) to enable government to reason with those most likely to mobilise against the state, and (b) to recruit citizens in the interests of the state. For Smith, the desirability of a flourishing political economy was dependent on a secure state that was dependent on the production of a ‘martial body’ of educated citizens. For Smith, the hierarchical education of each social class was necessary for the juridical, political, and economic processes of governing civil society (Kelly, Reference Kelly2015).

In the 20th century, the view of the child as a being vulnerable to the brute reality of political life, can be found in Arendt's (Reference Arendt2006) conception of the risks of education. Arendt cautions the dangers of an educational ideal that conceives of education as ‘an instrument of politics’ and that ‘political activity itself was conceived of as a form of education’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt2006, p. 157). She also warns against the dangers of Platonic utopianism where the child, understood by Arendt as (Reference Arendt2006) being new to the world, is subjected to ‘intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli’ (p. 157). Arendt sees that the natality of the child, a fact of being born into a world that is already old, ‘requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world’ (p. 161). This protection constitutes a form of apprenticeship through the agency of adults who bear the responsibility to lead children into the adult world. The adult's role is to protect the child against the tyranny of the world of children. For Arendt, the child's undeveloped capacity for reasoning renders them defenceless against the totalising effects of the pressure to conform. The role of the adult is to protect against the pressure to enter into public life too early, as children by ‘nature require the security of concealment in order to mature undisturbed’ (p. 169).

Ranciere (Reference Ranciere and Ross2007) takes the view that children are born equal and are already political by the fact of their capability to acquire language untutored. This contrasts with Arendt's view that the child needs to be tutored into the discourses of the world, in preparation for their responsibility to remake the world. For Ranciere, the speaking child is already a political subject (Biesta, Reference Biesta2013, p. 92). As Bingham and Biesta (Reference Bingham and Biesta2010) note, when the child addresses an adult interlocutor as a speaker, she deploys a linguistic force that demands recognition, not in a relation of inequality, but as a sentient being demanding to be heard:

Ranciere's perception of the child as already political inverts the Platonic view that the child is the subject of politics. Here, the task of being taught the right discourse turns literacy of the child into a question of politics. For Ranciere, the child's use of literacy makes the child a political subject. Whilst working from differing political persuasions, Plato, Ferguson, Smith, and Arendt objectify the child's literacy needs as something to be secured. For Ranciere, the child's literacy secures its own interest. It is against this background that I now discuss how the development of the literate child might be considered as a form of human security.

The Human Security-Development Nexus

The emergence of the security-development nexus in the latter part of the 20th century can perhaps be traced to the influence of Enlightenment philosophers who thought about good government in terms of security and the formation of educated subjects (Kelly, Reference Kelly2015). By 1994, and with the collapse of the Cold War, the United Nations had begun to shift its understanding of security through the development of a human security framework. The 1994, Human Development Report (UNDP) emphasised urgent shifts from orthodox concerns with the defence of borders and military capability to an expanded focus on the protection of individuals through sustainable human development:

Human security is conceptualised here as a reduction in the feeling of insecurity in people's everyday lives. Rather than be concerned with weapons, human security seeks to enhance ‘human life and dignity’ (UNDP, 1994, p. 22).

The link between human security and human development can be re-problematised as a technology of biopolitics – the government of life (Dillon, Reference Dillon2008). Duffield (Reference Duffield2005b) argues that human security can be seen as a ‘principal of formation. . .That is, as producing the humans requiring securing, and, at the same time, calling forth the state/non state networks of aid, subjectivity and political practice necessary for that undertaking’ (Reference Duffield2005b, p. 13). Whilst the development of a capability like literacy may be aimed at enhancing the ability of individuals and communities to take responsibility for their own care, following Duffield's argument, it might also be understood as directed at the management of threats and crises to the political economy. The integration of literacy into the security apparatus is a matter for government concern about the way young people develop and live their lives as citizens of the state. The use of literacy in the security apparatus functions as a technology of risk mitigation and biopolitical government. It can be understood as a way of contingently positioning the capabilities of human subjects and populations in relation to forms of rule (Dean, Reference Dean2008). Within a development model, the literacy of the child might be represented as both a necessary capability and a cure to human frustration and social dislocation. However, as Duffield (Reference Duffield2010) suggests, left un-problematised the dissemination of such values could be regarded as a form of colonialism. In the following, I draw closely on Duffield to further prepare the reader for my case analysis.

Human Security and Fighting the Barbarians

Duffield (Reference Duffield2005a) describes the post 9/11 evolution of the human security approach as a ‘biopolitical security mechanism’. Duffield also notes an increasing linkage between non-government involvement in human security approaches and state use of ‘hard’ security measures. He draws attention to ‘Native Administration’ in colonial countries as an early example of development where the aim was to ‘reconcile the disruptive effects of progress on indigenous peoples . . . with the need for societal order’ (Duffield, Reference Duffield2005a, p. 148). Duffield argues that human security is in part driven by a logic that recruits ‘savages’ to fight ‘barbarians’. The argument is reminiscent of the liberal Enlightenment philosophers such as Smith (1763/Reference Smith1982, 1776/Reference Smith2005), who in concern for the stability of civil society, contrasted the productive sociability of ‘savage’ races to ‘barbarians’. In Duffield's conceit, the task of development is to recruit the savage races up to the point that they could be used to ensure the hegemony of colonial power. Similarly, Duffield analyses contemporary approaches to sustainable development for their effects in substituting aspirational goals of developing peoples for a regime of containment in which ‘populations are now expected to live within the limits of their own powers of self reliance’ (Duffield, Reference Duffield2005a, p. 152). According to Duffield, biopolitical security strategies mobilise the political loyalty of the marginalised and alienated through the ‘satisfaction of basic needs’, the ‘expansion of market choice’, and the ‘betterment of self reliance’ (Duffield, Reference Duffield2005a, p. 154). Mechanisms of biopolitical security can be illustrated through education which ‘reflects the paramount importance of creating the right subjectivity or outlook among subject peoples if they are to be mobilized against external threats’ (Duffield, Reference Duffield2005a, p. 154). The deployment of a ‘cultural literacy’ (Donald, Reference Donald1992) for such purposes is a case in point. Duffield argues that ‘Native Administration’ and ‘sustainable development’ can be considered as a ‘recurrent development design of power . . . vectoring the colonial past to the colonial present’ (Reference Duffield2005a, p. 155). Elsewhere, Duffield and Waddell (Reference Duffield and Waddell2006) argue that contemporary forms of human security are being reinscribed within the ‘juridico-political architecture of the nation-state’ (p. 8), whereby security considerations increasingly ‘direct developmental resources toward measures, regions and sub-populations deemed critical in relation to the dangers and uncertainties of global interdependence’ (Duffield, Reference Duffield2005a, pp. 10–11). Australia is the kind of colonial country that Duffield describes and offers an important case for considering the inscription of security within the architecture of the state. In my discussion below, I draw on the Howard Coalition Government's 2007 decision to intervene in communities of Indigenous peoples of the Northern Territory. This was the last year of Howard's conservative government. The ‘intervention’, as it has come to be known, heralded the election of the Rudd Labor Government.

Governing Human Security

So far I have suggested that since Plato the development of the literate child has been a matter of political activity. In order to secure the polis, the polis needs to secure the child. Plato went so far as to say that the role of the state is to assume (loco-parentis) responsibility for developing the child as a virtuous subject. As a counterpoint to the Platonic legacy of developmentalism, Ranciere offers the possibility that the child is born politically agentful. I have also suggested that the concept of human security is of growing significance to contemporary governments and that the literacy of children might be seen as one tool to measure the relationship between human development and the security of the state. My brief discussion of the security-development nexus situated the problematisation of human security within forms of colonial governance to assure sovereign interests. Since the concept of human security was first proposed, interventions have been carried out by the United Nations, NGOs and foreign governments out of geopolitical concern for the stability of ‘fragile states’ and the freedoms of individuals living within these states. In this section, I consider how conceptualising the child as the object of security by the Australian government has taken place within a particular territory.

In Australian national security terms, arguments and strategies to do with failed states and the supposed ‘arc of instability’ (Ayson, Reference Ayson2007), normally reserved for regional neighbours, have been extended to zones within the national border. In January of 2007, writing for the Austral Peace and Security Network Policy Forum, Dillon (Reference Dillon2007), a senior public servant with experience in both the Northern Territory and Federal Governments, suggested that ‘the implications for national security which flow from policy outcomes in the Indigenous domain in Australia, particularly in remote Australia are more significant than generally recognised’ (Dillon, Reference Dillon2007, p. 1). He argued that:

Dillon's problematisation of the failure to address economic and social disadvantage presupposes a role for government in managing Indigenous peoples. Dillon argues that the effects of social disadvantage for Indigenous people, human security, and national security are connected, implying the need for better implementation of whole-of-government strategies in governing Indigenous policy.

The problem of not addressing the social and economic aspirations of Aboriginal communities is nested within the concern for national security, illustrating Bacchi's (Reference Bacchi2014) argument that policy problematisations can be nested within the other. It also demonstrates that the security apparatus of states (Foucault, Reference Foucault2007) is constituted by a whole of government approach that produces connected and embedded policy discourses. Dillon (Reference Dillon2007, p. 6) argues that the risks and potential dangers of weak governance are reflected by cases of ‘ad hoc and opportunistic violence within Indigenous communities in remote Australia’. He imagines the possibility of increased communal violence and Indigenous ‘incursions’ resulting in ‘longer term opportunistic subversion and violence directed against government institutions’ (p. 6). He then draws on the UN Human Development Index (HDI) to argue that ‘life expectancy, adult literacy and school enrolment, and per capita GDP’ act as a ‘proxy for government performance in meeting basic human needs’ (p. 6). Here, the problem of literacy is nested within the already nested problematisations of governance and national security. The Human Development reports use literacy to help frame questions of human security. They have a ‘globalizing’ influence, as demonstrated by Dillon's use of the report to bear on the local ‘problem’ of Indigenous literacy.

When switching to statistics on adult literacy levels in remote Australia provided by the Productivity Commission for the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Services, Dillon also claims that:

Dillon's essay rescales within the national border, geopolitical concerns about human security and violence, whilst problematising literacy levels in seeking to address questions of governance and human development. There is no doubt that the figures, as they are represented, are alarming. As presented by Dillon, the rates of attendance and participation in the youth demographic are a major cause for concern. The ‘problem as represented to be’ (Bacchi, Reference Bacchi2014) is how to intervene, as Duffield suggests, in ‘sub-populations’, where the use of normalising statistics suggest risks of social dislocation. In Foucauldian terms, Dillon's representation of the problem defines a spatial field endangered by an uncertain population in need of normalisation (Foucault, Reference Foucault2007).

In June of 2007, in response to the Little Children are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson, Reference Wild and Anderson2007) and media coverage on the current affairs programme Lateline (Brough, Reference Brough2007), the Howard government announced the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, with the stated intent of addressing child abuse claims in remote Indigenous communities. Despite Wild and Anderson producing a complex analysis, citing white influences on young women of Indigenous communities, the problem of child abuse was popularly blamed on concerns about violent Aboriginal males influenced by alcohol, pornography, and the general dissolution of acceptable community standards within these communities (Macoun, Reference Macoun2011). As Duffield (Reference Duffield2005a) has suggested, part of the problem for colonial governments in administering ‘native’ populations has been the securing of order and management of Indigenous peoples’ aspirations.

The Australian military and federal police were used to initiate the intervention. Since then, Australian and international commentators have hotly disputed the intentions and effects of the Australian Government's actions. (Anaya, Reference Anaya2010; Langton, Reference Langton2008). Much of this debate has focussed on the relationship between government responsibilities in meeting the human security needs of its population and the balancing of rights and entitlements of its population. The nature of the intervention also signalled shifts in the relationship between states and territories and the arguments required to legitimise and justify such action. The debate has been characterised by questions in relation to territorial occupation, executive denigration of rights, governmental misuse of information, the mediatisation of the disciplining of Aboriginal peoples, and the effect of the government's representation of its pastoral concern on the subjectivities of members of these communities. When viewed in Platonic terms, the government intervention asserts the sovereignty of the state to assume jurisdictional and pastoral responsibility for the government of the child.

The representation of a national emergency resulting from the failure of territorial governance in Dillon's essay and the Howard government's decision to take executive action are similar. Dillon's essay discursively produces a security emergency, whilst Howard's policy sets in motion a range of non-discursive regulations on Aboriginal communities in order to produce subjectivities consistent with colonist values. To use Duffield's provocative use of the metaphors of Enlightenment philosophers of liberalism, arguments proposing the destructive influence of ‘barbaric’ forces on the nobility of ‘savage’ society were used to legitimise a heroic gesture on the part of the colonial administration. Given the reaction the intervention provoked at the time, there is no doubt that the policy can be understood as a dividing practice, which troubled people both within these communities and outside.

Hereon, my intention is to focus on a discourse subjugated, or hidden from view, in the government's argument for imposing martial conditions on people living in these communities. In 1999, the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party Government withdrew support for bilingual programmes in Indigenous communities. At the same time, the labour opposition (Snowden, Reference Snowden1999) in the House of Representatives of the federal government questioned the effects of such a move and raised concern for the Australian Government's tacit support through programmes for teaching of English and the testing of English literacy within remote Indigenous communities.

Prior to the 2007 intervention and in a number of recommendations made by the Little Children are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson, Reference Wild and Anderson2007), the authors noted that:

As with Dillon, Wild and Anderson make a clear connection between issues of human development, human security and education. It is interesting to note, however, that the report recommended pedagogical approaches that acknowledge the rights and entitlements of Indigenous speakers to learn in their first language:

The report recommends:

Using Arendt's argument, both the natality of the child and the role of the adult to usher the child into a world already old has been disrespected. Wild and Anderson's report clearly challenged decisions made by the Northern Territory and Federal Governments to dismantle bilingual programmes in remote community schools. It implied a lack of appropriate resourcing in supporting the needs of Indigenous peoples to fulfil their cultural aspirations, whilst also making way for participating in mainstream society. According to Wild and Anderson, one of the effects of government education policy was to contribute to the frustration experienced by Indigenous people.

Similarly, Kral and Schwab (Reference Kral and Schwab2003), quoted in Dillon's essay, contested received arguments for pedagogies that sought to mainstream Indigenous people into using Standard English. According to Kral and Schwab (Reference Kral and Schwab2003, p. 14), literacy becomes ‘relevant only if it is linked to roles and responsibilities in the community’. They argue that literacy becomes meaningful when linked to a schema that acknowledges ‘core values of Indigenous Law, culture and language, that are integral to achieving and maintaining a state of well being’ (p. 14). For Kral and Schwab ‘Education must be part of the cultural and social framework of the community, that is, linked to community goals and aspirations’ (p. 14). These findings are similar to the research of sociolinguists in other parts of the world such as Heath (Reference Heath1983), and Street (Reference Street1984). In contrast, the measures of attainment, as evidenced in Dillon's use of the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision (Banks, Reference Banks2005), are founded on performance indicators (2005, p. 3.36) based on Literacy and Numeracy tests in the English language. In Rancierian terms, the child as speaker of her own language, and therefore as a political subject, has been delimited by being produced by policy as the subject of politics.

Public statements for the Australian Government intervention in the Northern Territory, did not use education as a justification for intervening; instead they claimed to be motivated by the reported incidence of child abuse and violence endemic within these communities. But neither did the Australian Government problematise the effects of its own policies on local community practices. Although Dillon's frustration with the impact of government policy was perhaps born out of sympathy for Indigenous people, his arguments masked aporetic tensions between Indigenous cultural experience and colonisation by Western ways of producing literate subjects, as identified by Wild and Anderson. The descriptions of breakdowns in human security and human development, in both Dillon's essay and the Little Children are Sacred Report, were partly founded on a conflicted mode of education delivery in attempting to meet the moral needs and wellbeing of identified Indigenous communities. However, the strategies suggested by Wild and Anderson, and those used by the Australian Government, were opposed. Instead, the incursion of the military, police, and commissioners represented the very strategies cited as failures of government policy in the Little Children are Sacred Report. The Government action privileged one particular axis of knowledge over another, denying more complex proposals and reasoning for the non-discursive effects of martial intervention.

For some, the Australian Government's strategy was an example of governmental exceptionalism (Agamben & Attell, Reference Agamben and Attell2010) that suspended responsibilities of the Northern Territory Government, aspects of the racial discrimination act and Indigenous control of lands. These strategies reflect Duffield and Waddell's (Reference Duffield and Waddell2006) point that human security is underpinned by an intelligibility that is reinscribed in the juridico-political architecture of the nation-state. As Plato might suggest, this action exemplified the role of the state to legislate and magistrate the life and virtue of the child. Using the case of literacy development, however, we can see that interventionist strategies have effects, some of which are unintended and some of which are subjugated. Luke (Reference Luke2004) makes this point when he warns about the sociological and material consequences of literacy programmes in local sites. He questions the degree to which literacy education ‘as an official modus operandi of the state is simply a cover for cultural and linguistic homogenization and, indeed, political hegemony over Indigenous peoples’ (2004, p. 332).

In the case of Australian Government intervention strategies, it could be suggested that Federal policy has been complicit in producing problems that are subsequently blamed on the State government and importantly on the subjects of the intervention. Interventionist strategies, such as programmes focussing on English literacy (Gray, Reference Gray2007), have been in part supported by Productivity Commission deployment of benchmarks utilising skills-based and cultural literacies of Standard English. Bearing in mind the use of data to secure human capital, national security concerns can be framed in economic terms and name sub-populations as not meeting national standards. However, recourse to such data also simplifies strategic struggles for what counts as literacy and civil society. It also obfuscates the frustrated struggles of subjugated peoples, including Aboriginal children, to act as political subjects when speaking to secure their aspirations.