Reading the past .....

This week I've been reading my way through the parliamentary debate on payment by results.  I've also been looking at large part of the public commentary on the measures, including the representations made to parliament whilst they were still being debated.  One of the most striking feature of making my way through this material is how well the case is argued on both sides.  Yet in a curious way they also seem to be talking past each other.  Each side invokes the case it wishes to fight against, constructing a kind of shadow argument it then takes apart point by point.  There is a mobilisation of tropes and rhetorical strategies that makes the other side's position look untenable.  This leads to a schizophrenic reading experience as I find myself agreeing first with one side,  then the other.  Yet I also think this has got me closer to resolving some of the methodological issues I've been thinking about.  Not by coming down on one side or another, but rather by spotting the residual and unspoken issues that seem to the rest at the heart of the debate.

In this case one of the points that seems most striking is the repeated difficulty of pinning down what people mean by "reading".  I think there are two different versions in play: reading as the basic skill - the knowledge of letters and their combination into syllables and whole words which can be tested through reading aloud.  And reading as the voyage through texts that happens once the basic skill has been acquired, and the kind of knowledge that can be built by browsing in this way.  In the debates on payment by results these are variously invoked, with little shared understanding of who is really talking about which one, when.  This confusion seems to me to run through the opposition to payment by results; but it also runs through pedagogical thinking and the resources and materials currently in place to teach reading.  I find myself seeing something that those participating in the debate at the time rarely fully articulate.  If I can get this written up then I may finally be doing history