Is literacy important?

[Eric]

Is literacy important? Well, without a lot of people who can read and write, this WLF website would have collapsed long ago. But illiteracy is a problem - and not only in developing countries. In an article about an Irish TV comedy series that touches upon illiteracy there is the following quote:

Isn’t it shocking that there may be hundreds of thousands of adults in Ireland, who have spent at least 10 years in our national education system, who can neither read nor write?

Source: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...287750128.html

This does make you think what the situation is like in Britain, the USA, etc., as well. In the developing countries the situation can be dire. Author Brian James, himself from Sierra Leone, claims that some 70% of the population there is illiterate. How many Tunisians can read and write, or Pakistanis, Iranians, Iraqis? Surely illiteracy leads to employment frustration, therefore indirectly to violence?

If you give an illiterate person a free computer, this might look good for national statistics, but he will only play computer games involving killing the enemy on it, and will never be able to read even a daily newspaper. Think about it.

[hdw]

There was an interesting programme on Radio Four the other day about people's memories and experiences of going to the cinema in the old days, when it was the "pictures" or the "flicks", you didn't have TV and your life was probably pretty hard, so the cinema offered welcome escapism.

One old boy remembered going to the silent films as a boy, and he said that as he tried to find a seat, voices would be coming out of the darkness saying "Can you read?" They wanted a kid to sit beside them and read out the subtitles. Illiteracy was rife even then.

I spend a lot of time downloading birth, marriage and death certificates as part of my genealogical researches. Despite the overblown claims made for Scottish education in the past, I often find people - especially in the fishing-communities - unable to sign their names even late in the 19th century, and just making their X.

Harry

[DWM]

This is largely a cultural issue - in Western hip culture it's not "cool", especially among males, to read books. Yet my experience, much of it in the jazz and music world, has taught me that while many people will not publicly admit to reading literature, they often do in secret or "between friends".

[Eric]

Here's rather an old thread that has become topical again. The London Evening Standard says that one in five parents in the UK appear to be be incapable of reading aloud to their children. I've always felt that the fact that my parents read aloud to me as a child helped me to learn to read myself. What do you think? The article:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standa...-read-aloud.do

[Loki]

Probably the fact that some of my shoolmates from high school can't read condifently in their own native language has somethiing to do with this. I've always associated their poor reading skills to laziness: I'd never thought of the fact that parents did not read to them when they were little children, and this is a new perspective. Still, I don't think they are "justified", like the sinner of the novel by Hogg.

The sad thing is that probably it is the same in many other countries.

[Eric]

As I will have written elsewhere on these threads, both my parents read to me as a child, my mother in Dutch, my father in English. This definitely contributed to my interest in language and literature later on in life, though I did not, of course, realise it at the time. It also helped me later in life to pick up the Dutch language and learn it to a level I may never have done, had not my mother read to me.

But nowadays, I suppose that parents are thankful that they have a little time to themselves to watch TV while their child is playing war games on his or her computer. So, no stories at bedtime.

[Eric]

The latest on British (lack of) literacy from one newspaper:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...-jobs-row.html

It would seem that one reason for importing workers from Eastern Europe to Britain is that they can at least read and write, while some British young people just don't possess such simple skills. So this is hardly a case of British xenophobia.