(Translators note: the graffiti reads [approximately]: "Evryone yunite in de straggle wit ilituracy")
In the run up to International Literacy Day, 8 September, the UN has published the disturbing findings of new research which show that global levels of secondary and even primary education have, in recent years, fallen. According to the results, illiteracy rates have been growing in the world since approximately the beginning of the new millennium. This rebuke to the world educational system was detailed further by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
The comprehensive research, conducted by academics from 77 countries, casts serious doubts on alleged efforts of governments around the world to increase literacy among their populations. The trend is clear; from 1999 to 2015 the number of literate people on earth has decreased from 4 to 3.7 billion. These figures are even more troubling when placed in the context of a global population that during the same period has grown from 6.3 to 7 billion. The number of children studying today is a third lower than the same figure in the closing years of the 20th century. Women are less literate then men; a third of women in the world are illiterate and have never been to school, and only less than half have attended a secondary school.
UNESCO’s main conclusion is troubling: in the struggle to eliminate illiteracy, humanity has come up against a stumbling block. On the one side, thanks to rapid strides in technological process the planet is becoming the global village that theorists have long anticipated. On the other side, life in this global village is becoming dangerously polarised. Of the 1.9 billion children of school-age alive today, 75 million have not been and are not going to school. More than half, 41 million, of these are girls. Only 55 countries out of the approximately 200 that cover the earth provide comprehensive primary education. That is of the many children who have been to school, many have been only for two or three years, or have learnt in schools where the education provided falls far short of the higher standards that are required for effective literacy in the 21st century. Some experts believe that if such children are excluded from the literacy count, this makes around 700 million children effectively illiterate.
Furthermore, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics believes the number of children for whom places at modern and well-equipped schools will be available is likely to fall in the coming years, as a result of growing income inequality in most of the world’s states.
How are the illiterate to cope in a world where technology is rapidly advancing? And how will our technology continue to advance if fewer and fewer people are going to school? Here it is crucial to note that the number of global citizens studying at university is also declining, a result, say the researchers at UNESCO, of tuition fee increases in developed countries and poor higher education provision in their developing neighbours.
UNESCO has called on the world to reverse this disturbing tendency. For its part, UNESCO continues to campaign and raise awareness. Academics at the international organisation are also developing a system of uniform higher educational standards, so that those who have received qualifications in one university that meets the standards can find work anywhere in the world, regardless of where they did their original studies.
The ability of UNESCO to affect global literacy trends is, however, increasingly being called into question, especially as their new research casts serious doubts on the organisation’s ability to identify such trends; previously, their academics had predicted universal secondary education by 2018-2020, an estimate which the new data make look seriously naïve. Moreover, the organisation has a history of making failed predictions. The first UNESCO International Literacy Day was held in Tehran in 1966, where the organisation announced its intention to eliminate global illiteracy by…. 1975. Yet despite concerted efforts during this period in China, India, Mexico and 12 African countries, even these states today have not succeeded in eliminating illiteracy, a global phenomenon which, as the new research proves, has actually increased in the last 15 years.
Other countries that once showed considerable promise have begun to fall behind in the global development race. In these countries either the number of absolutely illiterate, those who can neither read nor write, is on the rise, or the number of functionally illiterate, those who have received some schooling but who are unable to enter a global job market where computer skills are increasingly important, has grown. UNESCO has identified 57 countries in the world with problems in functional literacy rates; worryingly, many of these countries, such as Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Albania and Kosovo, once boasted proud records on education. An even more disturbing statistic concerns the 11 countries in the world where a staggering 70% of the population are illiterate; in the 1980s only seven countries suffered from such mass illiteracy.
These trends come at a time when economic trends demand even greater literacy from the world’s population. The basic skills of reading and writing are already insufficient to play a meaningful role in this modern world, which needs greater numbers of workers skilled in working with increasingly technologically-sophisticated tools. Meanwhile the UN is forced to continue concentrating on aims, of basic literacy, that it should have left behind long ago, goals where, moreover, the posts are being moved increasingly into the future.
Thus the defining problem of the 21st century is encapsulated by a trend which is the direct reverse of what economists had come to expect in the 20th century; the level of access to secondary education is decreasing where the economy is growing. Many of the countries which have so far provided the powerhouse of global economic growth in the 21st century, such as India, Latin American states such as Chile and Brazil, certain states in North Africa and even China, are failing to eliminate illiteracy.
China is, indeed, perhaps the most illustrative example. In 1981, Communist Party officials in China declared that Mao’s disastrous Cultural Revolution had thrown the country 20 years back into the past. Today, levels of primary and secondary education in China, despite the fantastic levels of economic growth in the last three decades, have still not exceeded in terms of quantity or quality those prevalent in the country in the 1970s.
The research also identifies what its authors see as the primary cause behind the lack of progress. In those countries with the highest birth rates, where families have between five and even ten children, on average only 3.4 of those children receive secondary education and a staggering 0.1 go on to higher education. Thus in Latin America, parents remove their children from education after five or six years, in order to help the family earn money by working on plantations growing coffee, bananas, or even cocaine. In Asia and Africa the bar for removing children from education in poor families is set even lower, after only three or four or even fewer years of education.
This return to a patriarchal model based on agricultural production in a global market is highly dangerous in the era of globalisation. In an effort to reverse the trend, the UN is campaigning for the introduction of laws which forbid parents to take their children out of education. Yet not all governments around the world sympathise with these efforts. India, for example, is catching up with China in terms of growth rates, but remains one of the most backward countries in the world for national access to secondary education. On the other hand Indian scientists, particularly in the spheres of advanced technologies and computing, are in great demand throughout the world. Will they help to close the gap?
On this subject world opinion seems to be divided. One half insists on the necessity of introducing legal guarantees on the provision of secondary education. The other half, the pragmatists, claim such laws would be unenforceable and berate their colleagues as utopian dreamers. Currently the pragmatists are winning the argument, and meanwhile the world continues to crawl towards a polarised future of tech-savvy masters and illiterate servants.
