Even in China!
A recent report in the Washington Post Foreign Service stated that, in China, despite a 50-year-old campaign to stamp it out and a government declaration in 2000 that it had been nearly eradicated, illiteracy is increasing. For the most part, the reasons rest with the infrastructure--or rather the lack of infrastructure. Although the law says that every child has the right to nine years of schooling, in many rural areas (and that is where most of the population live), schooling remains unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Those who do go to school often do so only for the very early grades. Then, once they leave, they “forget†what they learn.
Given the competition that now exists between the US and China, we may be tempted to embrace these findings and comfort ourselves with the idea that the Chinese after all, are not that great. That would be an unfortunate conclusion. It would be far better to use these findings to re-examine the situation in our nation.
Unlike China, we have the good fortune to have the infrastructure in place to educate all. The tragedy is that we are failing to do so! Despite our advantages, literacy problems consistently hover at around 40% of the population. Lowering those figures to the single digits --if not to zero-- should be one of the highest priorities in our nation. Unfortunately, despite the rhetoric and the nice posters in our libraries to the effect that reading is desirable, we are far from making this goal a reality.
