Literacy and Peace

Sep 09, 2012 Editorial

On the occasion of World International Literacy Day, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand expatiated on the theme for this year: Literacy and Peace. Taking into consideration the high literacy rate that Guyana has supposedly achieved, the Minister said, “Sometimes one is inclined to wonder whether, over the years, we have taken sufficient advantage of the gift of our literacy in the pursuit of dispute settlement and conflict resolution.”
The answer to her question might have much to do by what the Minister means by “literacy”. UNESCO defines a literate person as one who can, with understanding, both read and write a short statement relevant to routine life and be capable of analytical understanding of mankind’s condition in the world. We wonder if these criteria are applied to the Guyanese population as a whole, how many of us would pass muster as being ‘literate”.
With two-thirds of our students, fresh from eleven years of school unable to pass the CSEC English exam, it’s quite possible that many Guyanese would be hard put to “write a short statement relevant to routine life.” But it is the second criterion that is the greater problematic: “be capable of analytical understanding of mankind’s condition in the world.” It is this condition, which presumes both procedural and substantive elements of ‘literacy”, that is key to peace in the world, and of course, Guyana.
It is not just a question of being able to read, or even being ‘educated’ in the general sense of how the word is usually used today. Germany was acknowledged as among, if not the most literate and ‘educated’ nation in 1918 and 1939, but it launched wars against its neighbours that are the only ones to be defined a “world wars”. In each of those wars, countless millions were slaughtered as several countries were reduced to ‘wastelands’.
In 1939, what was the most salient feature of German education in social relations? It was the proposition that Jews (and for that matter, all ‘coloured peoples”) were inferior and could be exterminated under by the most ‘scientific’ measures. During colonialism, the supposedly ‘literate’ and educated western countries exploited hundreds of millions of conquered peoples under the rationale of ‘educating’ them. It was a ‘peace of the dead’.
The point is that for peace to be prevalent in the world, the content of the ‘literacy’ matters more than the ability to decipher words on a page. One of the prime drivers of conflict in the modern world continues to be the entrenched view that certain people are inherently ‘inferior’ to others. And as such they can be exploited, killed or even exterminated.
This now deeply inbred racism is a strong feature even here in Guyana where almost all of us are ‘coloured”. We would suggest that if the Minister wants to use literacy to increase our ‘peace quotient’, then she should introduce as part of our curriculum, a programme to detect and combat racism.
Then there is the ‘analytic understanding’ of our condition. We know to our cost that most individuals form their opinions and beliefs from stereotypes and prejudices and then act of them as if they were the ‘TRUTH’. We just have to consider the recent upheavals at Linden to appreciate the lack of ‘analytical understanding’ present especially in our leadership.
Did the leaders that provoked the protests really believe that the subsidies on electricity for Linden should not be gradually removed?
What has been revealed in most plural societies in which there have been eruptions of conflict, is that paradoxically it is those leaders that are most educated and ‘literate’ that twist the facts to stir up trouble in the ordinary people. It is only when the people have become habituated to analysing their condition that they will be more immune to the demagogues.
And so we return to our school system where we are still enmeshed in rote learning and ‘teach to the test’ methodology that leaves any analytical urge stillborn. Let us work to achieve real literacy in Guyana.

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