Are there books and reading materials? Are there places for relaxing reading and talking? Are there indicators of hobbies and special interests? Are the children’s projects on display? Is there a family bulletin board? Is there a television? (Is it the focal point of the sitting area? How many are there?) Do the children have a place of their own? Is the home child oriented? (Erwin, 1976, p. 43)
As Hays (1996) observed in the context of the implications for intensive mothering discourses for appropriate child-raising, all this activity to stimulate children’s literacy could get expensive. The children’s book-publishing industry, toys, games, and education companies all sought to benefit from, and thus joined in the work of, spreading the message of the importance of creating a stimulating literacy environment in the home. The way had been paved, then, for parents, and mothers in particular, to receive a new and yet more alarming message in the early 1980s that there was a literacy crisis in North America, and much of it had to do with parents’ “lax” attitude toward their children’s reading and scholastic success.
Although this study has documented the importance of women’s domestic literacy work to nation-building aspirations, this role was made yet more visible in the wake of new policies and practices introduced in A Nation at Risk, published by the US Commission for Excellence in Education, in 1983:
The people of the United States need to know that individuals in our society who do not possess the levels of skill, literacy and training essential to this new era will be effectively disenfranchised, not simply from the material rewards that accompany competent performance, but also from the chance to participate fully in our national life. (United States National Commission on Education, 1983, p. 7)
“A Nation at Risk”
was initiated in 1981 with the election of
US President Ronald Reagan. Its statements regarding literacy, knowledge, and
risk would come to shape new discourses of literacy advice well into the 1990s
and 2000s in Canada, as well as the United States. This document ushered in
the concepts of the “global village”
and the “new knowledge
economy”
in the context of concern for the United States’, and by
extension Canada’s, competitive advantage in what was described as an
increasingly competitive global economy. Certainly, the discourses associated
with the “risk”
economy would be circulated in international institutions
of the OECD, the World Bank, and UNESCO in ways that contributed to the coalescing
of education policy across diverse Western countries. The Nation at Risk report
was a precursor to trade liberalization agreements that characterized world
politics in the late 1980s and 1990s, in which: