This week's readings on "America's Perfect Storm" and "National Literacy Campaigns" have really brought a lot of questions to mind. I have always been more than a little bit skeptical about measuring literacy rates worldwide. In an effort to clear up some of my confusion, I looked up the
definition of "literacy rate" on the World Bank's website. According to
the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, literacy rate is the "percentage
of the population age 15 and above who can, with understanding, read and
write a short, simple statement on their everyday life. Generally,
'literacy' also encompasses 'numeracy', the ability to make simple
arithmetic calculations" (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS)
For me, there are a number of issues with this definition. For one thing, does the literacy rate really reflect the ability of a nation's population to participate in a shared discourse? Who determines if a sentence is relevant to a learner's everyday life? And furthermore, is the learner's everyday life even considered to be a part of the dominant discourse? According to Arnove and Graff's article "National Literacy Campaigns," large-scale efforts to provide literacy have been more closely related to the interests of establishing a moral or political consensus or nation-state building. As part of literacy campaigns, students may have been encouraged to memorize principles that they don't fully comprehend and that maybe have nothing to do with their everyday lives. Despite the discrete skills that they possess to manipulate text, they STILL may be marginalized and unable to participate in their nation's larger discourse. In that sense, they may still be seen as illiterate by their society. Furthermore, is it fair to compare literacy rates among different nations when literacy might mean different things for each population? Since literacy is a very subjective term, doesn't it render literacy rate statistics almost meaningless? To me it doesn't seem that a literacy rate is something that can be so easily quantified, especially on a global scale.
For me, there are a number of issues with this definition. For one thing, does the literacy rate really reflect the ability of a nation's population to participate in a shared discourse? Who determines if a sentence is relevant to a learner's everyday life? And furthermore, is the learner's everyday life even considered to be a part of the dominant discourse? According to Arnove and Graff's article "National Literacy Campaigns," large-scale efforts to provide literacy have been more closely related to the interests of establishing a moral or political consensus or nation-state building. As part of literacy campaigns, students may have been encouraged to memorize principles that they don't fully comprehend and that maybe have nothing to do with their everyday lives. Despite the discrete skills that they possess to manipulate text, they STILL may be marginalized and unable to participate in their nation's larger discourse. In that sense, they may still be seen as illiterate by their society. Furthermore, is it fair to compare literacy rates among different nations when literacy might mean different things for each population? Since literacy is a very subjective term, doesn't it render literacy rate statistics almost meaningless? To me it doesn't seem that a literacy rate is something that can be so easily quantified, especially on a global scale.
