My pure serendipity, the theme for this year’s International Literacy Day (ILD) – the 50th since its inauguration – is “Reading the Past, Writing the Future”. It can just as truly be said: those that cannot read their past stand in danger of having others do the reading and then transmit a self-serving message driven by the latter’s self-interest. In this way, the illiterate group’s future can literally be “written” out of the arc of history.
While universal literacy was the goal of UNESCO from its formation in 1946, with an eye on the developmental needs of the Third World, the Teheran Conference that launched the ILD fifty years ago introduced a new term, “functional literacy”. This went beyond mere “literacy” that allowed individuals to merely convert letters into phonics and, in the spirit of the times, was quite ideological. Functional literacy was seen as “as an essential element in overall development . . . closely linked to economic and social priorities and to present and future manpower needs”.
[The Conference] “accepted the new concept of functional literacy, which implied more than the rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing that is often inadequate and sometimes chimerical. Literacy instruction must enable illiterates, left behind by the course of events and producing too little, to become socially and economically integrated in a new world order where scientific and technological progress calls for ever more knowledge and specialization.” For years, the ideological debate continued within UNESCO as to what constituted “functional literacy”.
Coincidentally however, just a year after Teheran, the author William Grey offered a definition of “functional literacy” that is quite close to what is commonly accepted today: “a person is functionally literate when he has acquired the knowledge and skills in reading and writing which enable him to engage effectively in all those activities in which literacy is normally assumed in his culture or group.”
The question arises by this measure, how literate are we in Guyana? According to the official statistics, Guyana has a literacy rate of 88.5%. But from the criteria above it should be clear to most readers that this measurement is related to the original measure of “literacy” – that is, to be able to make sounds that corresponds to letters. It certainly does not measure up to William Grey’s definition of functional literacy, which at least offers some rationale as to why literacy should be valued and striven for.
But from this year’s theme, it is clear that the world is now setting a much higher bar for “literacy”; one that is quite relevant for Guyana today. We are in the midst of a claim that has been made against England and a number of other European states for “Reparations” for the effects of slavery on descendants of Africans who were dragged across the Atlantic. The eradication of those effects have also prompted the UN to declare that countries take action during the ongoing “Decade for People of African Descent”. Citizens of this country must be literate at a level where they can “read the past” to understand the argument for Reparations and the reasons proffered by England for rejecting those claims.
Next year will also be the 100th Anniversary of the Abolition of Indentureship of – in order of arrival – freed West Indian ex-slaves, Portuguese, Africans rescued from European slave ships, Indians and Chinese. There have been several claims and counter claims by activists in the several ethnic communities that are grounded in historical circumstances which must also be “read” and evaluated. Additionally, there are the lands that have been allocated to Indigenous Peoples based on a “reading of the past” that has been disputed by some.
All these matters and others that are in dispute can only be settled so we can collectively “write a future” if each citizen are literate enough to read and evaluate the evidence on their own. This is the “literacy” that Guyana needs.
