This essay explores some of the underlying (and often unacknowledged) theoretical and political tensions and ambiguities in recent literacy education policy in Ireland. Employing the strong critical pedagogical frameworks present in two seminal philosophers in education, Paulo Freire and Jean-François Lyotard, I focus on the simultaneous progressive and anti-progressive aspects of dominant literacy education proposals for schools. These tensions stem not simply from the models of literacy themselves (although they are present there). Rather, they also relate to structural or systemic questions, what might be called the ‘politics of education’, or here ‘the politics of literacy education’. Lyotard’s work especially casts light on the complexity of the ‘postmodern’ situation of education, where increasing recourse to rhetorics of ‘emancipation’ and ‘empowerment’ can often mask a more overarching managerialism, which is highly conservative. Freire’s work on literacy education, while accused of utopianism, focuses on a more micro- and generative level of educational and student change, which eschews more macro- and top-down models of education and literacy. This paper will seek to explore some of the insights which Paulo Freire’s seminal work on literacy, begun in the late 1950s in Brazil (Freire, 1992 and 2005; Freire & Torres, 1994; Brown, 1975), can bring to the context of understanding contemporary notions of literacy education. There has been a renewed focus in recent years from governments and ministries of education on the topic of literacy (Department of Education and Skills, 2010; National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, 2011; NCCA, 2012a), but such an emphasis also brings with it tensions and ideological disagreements. One of the main dangers of such approaches is the tendency to isolate literacy education as some kind of specific technical expertise, which can be divorced from other aspects of teaching and being in the classroom. This kind of specialised technical knowledge then becomes the most important index of what progressive or successfully accomplished teaching must aim at, and is accompanied by back-up test scores and measured performance results from both teachers and students, allowing schools to be placed hierarchically in competitive school league tables. This is both intra-national and international (DES, 2010).

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