Once again, these images of ideal reading suggest that literacy advice is not only about promoting children’s abilities to read and write, but also about promoting and maintaining a middle-class literacy habitus. Indeed, the concern for a “reading culture” may also have been a response to increased immigration to Canada and the United States in the wake of World War Two, as well as the context the Cold War in which the maintenance of cultural ideals seemed particularly important for distinguishing North American and Western European societies from those of Eastern Europe. But before moving to this theme in literacy advice, it is important to consider the shifting relationships between children’s literacy and parental involvement in schools.
Domestic literacy work entailed not only managing literacy experiences inside the home, but also managing the literacy relationships between the home, school, and broader community. Indeed the lines between the domestic and public sphere become blurred through a literacy lens in which the work of mothers crossed and intersected each of these domains. What is “family literacy” and what is “school literacy” is more difficult to distinguish as the ideals of a “reading culture” meld with the ideals of school success and nation-building. This theme enters the data analysis during this early 1950s era, and becomes even more important in the analysis of literacy advice in the 1990s.
Spock (1957) believed that parental work for “good schools”
was
a cornerstone of democracy. He encouraged mothers to effect school reform by
“becoming members of local parent-teacher associations, attending meetings
regularly and showing the principals and superintendents they are interested
in good schools”
(p. 316). Woolgar (1954) in Food for Thought noted that
the “changing view of the child”
and new-found theories about the
“integration of body, mind and spirit,”
led to an increase in home-school
co-operation whereby the “whole child”
and his different lives were
brought together in a shift from “authoritarianism to democratic governance”
(p. 33). He reported that “a full 2% of Canadian parents were involved
in their children’s school in the form of willingly contacting their children’s
teachers and visiting the school”
(Woolgar, 1954, p. 34), a marked increase
over former years, though lower than desired since “10% of children badly
needed the cooperative effort of parents and teachers”
(p. 31). Woolgar
attributed this increase in parental involvement to higher levels of parent
education through which parents had become better versed in the mental health
principles that regarded the child as a “whole.”
It was the application
of sound mental health principles in the home, and the cooperation between parent
and teacher in promoting these principles, that was deemed key to children’s
learning, and even more importantly, the promotion of “democratic ideals”
and “sound mental health”
(1954, p. 31).