Yesterday was “International Literacy Day”, under the theme, ‘Transforming Literacy Learning Spaces’. Your Eyewitness figures that mean not seeing the transmission of literacy confined to formal schools or even rooms. It doesn’t matter where you find the illiterates – you gotta nab them and enlighten them wherever you can!! The shepherd with his flock?? Teach him while the flock’s grazing – and nowadays you can do this any number of ways via the internet that’s now available – even in the interior!!
The Ministry of Education, in its wisdom, with that theme in mind, hosted a “drop everything and read!” programme and book drive in observance of Literacy Day. Now, knowing Guyanese, you wanna bet some government employees “cocked up” their feet on their desks and read the day away – while brushing off supplicants for their service??!! But the thought is good: we SHOULD take time to “drop everything and read” nowadays. Especially when you consider that less and less people are reading.
It’s affected our politics – the main vocation of our people – in case you didn’t notice. Who reads newspapers nowadays? Especially those long drawn out articles from which the older reporters can’t wean themselves away!! These days, people’s eyes start to glaze over after 5 sentences – and that’s stretching it!! The social media talking heads are the way to get news for that lot – all the news that’s NOT fit to print!! The gorier and more scandalous they are, the more hits they get!! As does their revenues!! If that isn’t a formula for bottom feeding, what is?? So we support the exhortation to “drop everything and read”!! Even if it’s the headlines of the dailies!
But there was an interesting letter in the press from the Chief Education Officer informing us that evidently, the MoE has an even more radical understanding of the need for “literacy”. He noted, “UNESCO Director-General issued a clarion call to “all actors in the field of education and beyond to re-think the role of literacy” and cited the renowned theorist Paulo Friere in noting that literacy should entail “the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world”.
Now as you can tell from that quotation, Friere is also going to the CONTENT of education – which our MoE sees as suitable right now. Friere saw education as never neutral but supremely political – either educating to support and maintain the status quo or helping to critique and change reality. It was a restatement of Marx’s exhortation that the point isn’t to “interpret” the world, but to CHANGE it??
So the Ministry’s calling for us to storm the barricades??
…living conditions
Oh…how the world’s a changin’. Only a few decades ago, China provided the metrics against which the West showed how superior they were against “the rest” in living standards. But today that’s all changed as a consequence of China’s meteoric rise in the economic sphere – poised to overtake the US as the largest economy in the world. Now some may think that’s only because of their humongous population that gives the Purchasing Power Parity. But it’s reflected in life chances metrics like life expectancy.
For instance, in 1949, their life expectancy was only 36 years. By 1980, it had increased to 65.5 years. This increase is attributed mostly to improved nutrition and lowering of mortality due to decrease in infectious diseases. And here in 2022, China’s passed the US in life expectancy – clocking in at 77.1 years, vs 76.1 years for the US!! Isn’t that incredible?? India’s got a ways to go at 70 years – like ours.
But it’s far from their 32 years at Independence!
…our invidious comparisons
The census just launched isn’t only gonna be counting noses. It’ll collect data on income and consumption. Hopefully, the authorities will disaggregate the figures by ethnic group, to provide a reading – not “feelings” – on comparative poverty rates.
