Eradicating illiteracy in South America

international | education | other press Sunday August 02, 2009 14:22 by Susan Boyle - ( iosaf )

BBC News has this weekend added a piece on Hugo Chavez's "revolutionary reading list" to its feature pages. It's a curious article whose timing four months after the launch of the list appears to say little and omit plenty. We are told how there are queues of people in Caracas awaiting a free copy of French 19th century author Victor Hugo's masterpiece "Les Miserables" (in Spanish translation). One happy fellow tells the local BBC chap he's seen the movie and now wants to read the book. I wonder has he ever tried to sing the songs and get on a talent competition?

But this curious space filler (all the more curious because in internet news one doesn't have to fill space) prompts me to quickly cast an eye over the efforts of South America to banish illiteracy.

Emile-Antoine Bayard's illustrations for Victor Hugo & Jules Verne put the sacharin sweet in poverty.

Without a doubt the policies of Venezuela under Chavez have yielded astounding resutls in the last decade. The achievement of her literacy projects are even acknowledged by her critics. But how are other states coping and is the urge and impetus to tackle illiteracy in any way to be considered a core leftist priority and moreover a general leftist triumph? Is teaching people to read and write somehow something one generally has to await to see a leftist or Boliviarian regime elected to enjoy?

it would seem so.

Nicaragua has in the last month as we know played host to ousted president Zelaya of neighbouring Honduras and celebrated the anniversary of its elected regime's former revolutionary period under the FSLN. It also marked the achievement of complete literacy in its capital city. Nicaraguans of the capital it seems have gone from not being able to read and write (such as was the widespread condition when the USAF dropped leaflets on the jungle to oust the FSLN regime during the Iran Contra days) to in the last years under a Bolivarian regime achieve 99% literacy. As we all know in the world of manipulating 20 odd Roman based characters and understanding their communicative function and using them succesfully to construct words and then phrases, for some reason is considered complete at 99%. Even if articulate Ireland of the saints, scholars & rascals there is still to be found a persistent 1% or lower group of people who for some reason don't want to read or don't feel it would serve them doing it. The rest of the state currently stands at 4.73% illiteracy. Less than ten years ago under a right wing regime it stood at 19%

We may compare Nicaragua's case with that of Mexico : a federated state of much wealth, much diversity, many people and very established federal infrastructure. Mexico has announced its goal of ending with illiteracy this side of 2069 . The rightwing governed state estimates that it is how long it will take to teach its approximately 33 million citizens who no doubt will not stopping have illiterate babies in the meantime. Yet within the Mexican federation in the autonomous mountain communities of our own much loved Chiapas, we find zero illiteracy. Admittedly the population of Chiapas is marginal to the population of Mexico as a whole but the point must be acknowledged that Chiapas reads and writes, because Chiapas taught itself to read and write.

there must be something in this reading and writing..,

Indeed there were 147 Cuban trained literacy teachers working in Honduras that same week Nicaragua made her breakthrough and unsurprisingly Cuba announced their withdrawl.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/epa/article/ALeqM5hdvM...0kB7Q

Peru under its Garcia (as we all boo!) has set itself the target of ending illiteracy which some estimate at 4% now by 2011. They are dealing with 1.3 million illiterate Peruvians, who again oddly enough do not appear to be concentrated in the jungle zones but areas of poverty where nobody is ever heard to complain articulately about how miserable they might feel their lot is in life.

Just like those 11.5 million Brazilian kids who can't read now and though constitute less than 10% of their federated state's population really ought to be the focus of education. So that someday they can pick up free books or read scripts to movies and live in the city of the gods.