What is critical literacy and why is it important?

Colin Harrison (2004) p152 suggests that the answer is "that language practices are becoming evermore important in determining, reproducing and sustaining power relations that dominate and control our society, and since many of those language practices operate in ways that are implicit rather than explicit, it becomes a matter of great importance to be able to locate, identify and critique those practices."

He also suggests that critical literacy attempts to challenge what schooling is attempting to do, in a sense that people become confident in articulating and manipulating their use of language and text to enable literacy to influence people.This is termed socially active literacy but is not the sole purpose of critical literacy.

There is a strong indication that a lot of real life issues that teachers will deal with, involve a deep moral undertone, for example dealing with terrorism as many children that come into school may have preconceived ideas and we have a responsibility to remain neutral. As teachers we merely provide them with the tools to unpick what they already know.