Increasing Literacy

May 20, 2009 Editorial

This newspaper has long been a booster of the Ministry of Education’s efforts to raise the standard of literacy in our schools. Literacy has been important in the development of societies for centuries but never so fundamentally, as in today’s globalised world that is seamlessly linked by the internet.
There was a time when an agrarian society might have been able to get by on information transmitted through oral traditions but those days are long gone.
Today, the successful farmer must be able to look up say, world market prices for rice, or fertilizers before deciding how much he will be investing on present crops or else he stands a good chance of losing his shirt. He has to be literate. For other professions, the point is moot.
The Ministry has been implementing a number of programmes in the primary schools designed to rectify what is universally, if euphemistically, acknowledged as “a breakdown in reading standards” in our society. The situation is more along the lines of a “total collapse” so the intervention at the lowest level of the educational system is very apropos. We are never going to fix any broken institution if its foundation is neglected.
About six years ago “Assessment Tests” were introduced at the second and fourth grade levels that incorporated a “Reading” component.
The detailed analysis of these assessments have never been made public but from official pronouncements, the dire straits our children’s literacy were confirmed in spades. The Ministry plunged into a host of initiatives. Working through the National Centre for Education Resource Development (NCERD), the Ministry initiated a remedial literacy programme for students that had been identified with weak literacy skills to be completed after they wrote their Sixth Grade Assessments.
This programme, intended to ensure that the students would be in a better position to absorb the Secondary School curriculum, is outside of the normal school hours but within the school premises.
The programme has now been extended to all grades and earlier this week the Minister of Education announced a new policy initiative in the battle to raise the literacy levels: “Children (Grade Four pupils) must pass the literacy test and must obtain a literacy certificate before they can proceed to write the Grade Six Assessment, and if they fail it they will have to rewrite it six months after and every six months until they pass.”
We support this move unequivocally. There is no point in just pushing children into higher grades when they are unable to deal with the more complex materials at the basic level of reading and comprehending them.
We are doing a disservice to both the children and the new teachers as we only increase their frustration levels.
Many parents have not been playing their part in supporting the new program: they see it as “make work” to keep their children busy after the assessments. The new initiative should bring home, very forcefully, the need for them to get fully aboard. If the truth be told, parents will have to become much more involved if we as a nation expect to turn the corner on literacy. The efforts in the schools must be supplemented in the homes and in the communities.
Only parents can ensure that books become part of their children’s environment by purchasing or borrowing for them.
In those communities that are not fortunate to have libraries, especially in the rural areas, parents can organise informal reading and library centres. There are several organisations that have commendably taken up the charge to make books available to such organisations at greatly reduced rates: parents must make use of these opportunities.
Maybe the Ministry can work out some arrangements to support such “community libraries”.
In the meantime, the libraries that have been established in Primary Schools as well as the internet-ready computer-rooms, can be opened up on weekends for students.
Unfortunately, most primary school administrators have not integrated the reading and computer literacy programmes effectively within normal school hours and this lacuna can be filled on weekends. Keep on reading.

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Increasing Literacy

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