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Leis, Illiteracy's facets and effects

Illiteracies and learning to live

by Raúl Leis R. --- raulleisr@hotmail.com

To know neither how to read nor write is like being nude and abandoned in a storm, and thus absolute illiteracy is an enormous manifestation of educational vulnerability, which expresses inequality in access to knowledge, which is indivisibly united with inequality in access to wellbeing. Latin America has 43 million people who are absolutely illiterate. Panama has been able to appreciably reduce this, but the same can't be said about functional illiteracy and other forms of the same condition.

Functional illiteracy is the absence of or deficiency in the capacity to read and write with comprehension. It has to do with the absence of reading and writing as a functional, necessary and indispensable medium for the beautiful and productive activities in society, and it grows, above all, out of activities designed for the learning of letters, but devoid of social and productive functionality. It's linked to the absence of opportunities to go to school, and the problem it poses is related to the low quality of school teaching and with the phenomena of repeated grades and dropouts, with traditional concepts in education and the insufficient application of the different methods of instruction in reading and writing.

It is reckoned that our population is affected by elevated levels of functional illiteracy. Around 40 percent live in this situation. That is to say, a very important part of the population has limited its reading to the indispensable --- and the same occurs with writing --- and has stopped practicing these up to the point of having totally lost these skills. In reality, investment in literacy serves the country little or nothing if it is not pursued with a broad and continuous program to promote reading and writing in order to shape and consolidate good reading habits.

Functional illiterates, although they nominally know how to read and write, are deprived of the functionality necessary to respond to the needs of most jobs. In the United States, the presidential "Excellence in Education" commission said that about 13 percent of 17-year-old youngsters can be considered functional illiterates, approximately 40 percent are incapable of drawing inferences from written material, only one-fifth can compose a convincing essay and only one-third would be able to resolve a mathematical problem that required various steps.  In Spain, it is calculated that 10.5 million people who are are more than 15 years old and possess primary education certificates are affected by this sort of illiteracy. It is not, then, sufficient to get a certain minimum grade in school to ensure the capacity to use reading and writing with ease, and to continue developing one's abilities at this over a lifetime.

The profound causes of the problem are an instrumental literacy, dispossessed of its narrative and rhetorical heart; and a literacy lacking its anchorage as an efficient medium for significant activities in daily life.

The capacity to read, write and comprehend written information should be founded upon the capacity to generate reflexive habits and attitudes about learning. From this perspective a scholarly individual would be one who not only can use his or her abilities to understand a text, but one who can continue developing his or her abilities, capacities and knowledge about the kinds of texts he or she reads, and about the types of challenges presented by the situations of which he or she reads and writes.

To basic and functional illiteracy, today we add digital illiteracy, which affects not only the youth, but also teachers and other adults, and especially persons in situations of extreme poverty. This is the result of falling behind in the management of new technologies that allow access to information by electronic media and by multimedia applications. Today the technological gap between Panama and the world's most advanced countries in the field of new information technologies is not addressed in a sufficient way.

The Delors Report gives us other guiding lights by which to "transcend the purely instrumental education considered as a necessary way to obtain results (money, careers, etc.) and change it so that it considers the totality of education's function." It proposes four pillars of education: learn to know, learn to do, learn to live together and learn to be.

Perhaps received education makes us literate and prepared in these four pillars? I think not. There are other forms of illiteracy that are expressed in the anti-values, intolerance, violence and authoritarianism that many citizens embrace, which demands that we also become literate in a new culture that's democratic, solidary, participatory and critical.

A thorough and profound educational transformation is necessary, including in this framework the promotion of reading for people of all ages, which stimulates creativity, foments and educates sensitivity, awakens and orients reflection, demands concentration and cultivates intelligence.