Encouraging literacy

Oct 08, 2012 Editorial

As we reported last week, the Ministry of Education is going to launch another initiative to improve literacy in our public schools. Minister Priya Manickchand wants “to pull together all our local experts in literacy from across whatever divides we imagine we have; be it political, geographical or gender – all of our experts, wherever they are, we will bring them together to sit down, formulate and brainstorm what would be the best way forward in pushing the literacy agenda.”
This is a welcome initiative. We used to read more newspapers: both in relative and absolute terms. In the sixties there were at least twice the number of different newspapers published daily – and they all had their loyal readership. Then there were the institutions that encouraged broader reading. There were formal ones like the libraries that were established in the Community Centres of every sugar estate.
What did it mean for us as a nation? We were certainly better informed at a minimum and the general level of “street corner” discussions were just as certainly wider ranging. Wide reading helped earn us the sobriquet “most politically developed” in the region.
Our educational achievements made us the envy of the Caribbean; our scholars, doctors, lawyers and other professionals adorned its institutions. They gave us a positive stereotype and made us welcome everywhere.
The retort to the above may be that books and reading are in decline all over the world and yet other countries continue to flourish. While the part about books and reading may be true, it is not reflective of the total picture and as a result can give us a distorted view of the reality.
Firstly, in the developed world, where there has been a decline in reading of books, the development has not been accepted complacently. There has been a vigorous debate about the phenomenon and in each of those countries programs have been introduced both at their national and local levels to reverse the trend.
Secondly, books and reading were a methodology for the transmission of knowledge, which played a pivotal role in moving Europe out of their “dark ages” and into a position of dominance based on the effective deployment of that knowledge.
Today the developed countries are exploring newer and more efficient ways of transmitting knowledge to supplement books. Thus, while books may be in decline in those societies, reading may actually be increasing due to the ubiquity of the internet and the vast amount of written information in its archives.
Today, each individual with a modem has at his or her disposal, a library incomparably vaster than the fabled one at Alexander of Yore. There is even a movement to actually introduce a number of courses in several colleges that require no books – just information to be downloaded from hyperspace.
What does all of this mean for us as a nation today? In a globalised world that is developing exponentially based on the increased speed of the transmission of data, it would seem obvious that our citizens must become au fait with the information flow if we are to not remain permanently mired in the backwaters. This means returning to the basics – which always began with “reading”.
We can do worse than follow the lead of the developed world and attempt to increase the reading component of our schools’ curriculum. “Reading” was the first of the “3R’s” that formed the foundation of our once high-flying educational system.
There have been concerns raised about the effect of copyright laws on making books prohibitively expensive. Today, a dedicated band of computer experts are dedicated to making knowledge freely available. Books can be legally downloaded for free. The OLPF will also assist in making the ‘world library’ available to children.
But the key to the success of any literacy programme will be the involvement of parents who will have to encourage reading at home, through their own example. At a minimum every home should have at least one daily newspaper read by the parents – and available to the child.

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Encouraging literacy

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