A BLOG WRITTEN BY JAPHETH MONZON
International Literacy Day has been celebrated since 1967 in the hopes of creating a future generation where literary poverty has been eradicated. Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, stresses that there is a “transformative effect on both a family and the wider community” when an individual is literate. As of now, one in six adults globally remain illiterate, unable to read or write. International Literacy Day aims to combat this through raising awareness and invigorating global citizens to act against illiteracy in all its forms – whether as remnant of imperialist ambitions, or a by-product of poverty and political corruption.
This ‘transformative effect’ is evident in literacy’s power to lift individuals out of poverty by creating new and exciting opportunities for people to develop their skills. Literacy positively impacts economic growth beyond local communities and has an inevitable impact on the health and wellbeing of individuals in a given community. In order to gain greater insight into the role of literacy within wellbeing, I interviewed Rhea Chadha – a Special Education Needs Teaching Assistant educating local Bristolian primary schools on the importance of literacy in schools, particularly amongst women and Black & Minoritised children.
“Yes, literacy is very important to society. But we need to establish that literacy encompasses more than just reading. You can have creative literacy, health literacy, and numerical literacy – which are all important in cultivating a child’s wellbeing. Wherever you go, the cities that have high literacy rates also have low crime rates. This isn’t just limited to schools in the United Kingdom. That trend applies to nations around the world.
But I find that we also need to start paying attention to the pressing matter of literacy rates amongst women, especially Black and Minoritised women. Creating literate women does great things for a community. Kerala, for example, has a low crime rate in comparison to other places in India. This can be attributed to the high literacy rate amongst men and women in the region.”
A group of school girls from Karnataka, India
Indeed, Rhea’s point prompted me to investigate further into the impact of literacy on the wellbeing women and their communities, as well as discovering more about the root causes of high illiteracy in the Global South. My research uncovered that Kerala’s literacy rate stands at an impressive 96.2% compared to the average literacy rate of 77.7% that represents the entirety of India. Moreover, the literacy rate amongst Keralan women stands at a strong 95.2% – a national high for India. Such statistics invokes past lessons I had learnt during Geography classes. Having been taught by a Bangladeshi woman, the importance of human geography as an investigative tool to critique policy and infrastructure has become salient. Indeed, the aforementioned classes (which focused upon the education of women in Kerala) revealed a direct correlation between female literacy and reduced infant mortality rates, reduced vulnerabilities to health problems, and a marked increase in the economic growth of the region. Certainly, encouraging literacy – particularly amongst women – reaps incredible benefits to communities around the world.
But human geography has also imposed an inquisitive nature to my investigations: Why are 771 million young people and adults around the world still illiterate?
Further research revealed an insidious truth that requires a global perspective to understand. On the 2nd day of February in the year 1835, the Right Honourable Thomas Babington Macaulay released his missive – commonly known as ‘Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education’ – calling for the withdrawal of Sanskrit and Arabic-derived texts from the Indian education system. The Memorandum served to revise the traditional village-school system (a system that provided near-universal literacy) to a system that imposed British knowledge, British logic, and British values on colonised Brown bodies. In essence, Macaulay’s Minute represents an ontological eradication of South Asian identity, as well as epistemicide on a grand scale. Macaulay thus curated:
“A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.””
The quote by Lord Macaulay. Courtesy: Anirban Mitra
By replacing community-led schools, the children of the economically deprived classes were forced to withdraw their participation from the education system that would have otherwise provided them with the opportunity to make them literate. Indeed, according to Michael Baker in On the Colonizing Consequences of “Literacy” in the Early Modern/Colonial World-System, schools served as colonial institutions, with schooled literacy having become a colonising practice crafted to reproduce and legitimate colonial ideals rather than serving to educate students. Even to this day – as explained by Arusha Cooray in Does Colonialism Exert a Long Term Economic Impact on Adult Literacy? – countries that have been historically colonised have experienced slower strides of advancement in regard to improvements of literacy rates. Cooray astutely identifies that in pre-colonial nations, education was likely open to a greater majority of people. Meanwhile, countries not colonised tended to make greater strides in areas of literacy. These populations did not have to face the challenge of learning a new lingua franca, nor did they have to overcome the struggle of reversing colonial legacies on education by re-instating their native tongues. Cooray’s conclusion is evidently seen the rates of education of former colonised nations and serves to emphasise the importance of celebrating an International Day of Literacy.
As much as those that live in privilege speak out to advocate for International Literacy Day, we must also be open to reciprocating and receiving lessons as well. Understanding the histories of human populations, and the atrocities imposed upon them, is integral to an effective advocacy for literacy. Colonial histories are a root cause for many of the world’s educational deficits, and it is our duty as individuals that reside within the Global North to de-colonise and deconstruct the systems that perpetuate literary poverty. We must support the reinstatement of community-led learning in areas that have been previously ravaged by imperialism – in hopes that we can finally fulfil Ban Ki-moon’s dream of global literacy.
Rhea Chadha is a Special Needs educator working in local Bristolian schools as part of her journey to become a teacher. Coming from the education systems of Singapore and India, Rhea has an adept understanding of the impacts of colonialism on learning within previously colonised nations. Rhea is also holds a BSc in Psychology in Education from the University of Bristol.
Image of Rhea Chadha