Since 1998 there has been an ambitious attempt to raise standards of literacy in English schools through national strategies targeted at primary schools and at Key Stage 3 in secondary schools. This article views this initiative as a governmental enterprise aimed at forming the capacities and reshaping the understandings of teachers and their pupils in order to produce the citizenry required by a modern nation-state. It is argued that this endeavour has been vitiated by a guiding rationality that is undemocratic and impatient of scholarly process. The national strategies are ill fitted to the task of forming individuals capable of sustaining and enhancing democratic society in a period of cultural and communal plurality. This article attempts to clear some of the ground for considering how such an educational and governmental task might be more appropriately addressed.
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