Humans are known as thinking and talking animals. More than any other living thing, we have the faculties of language and abstract thinking. These competencies are closely linked - language allows us to represent and manipulate abstract concepts like time, space, and causality. It also allows us to reason about hypothetical situations and to make predictions.
Khalid Chaudhry, Associate Director of ActionAid Association, highlights key strategies for enhancing literacy in India.
Here Are The Key Points
Focus on early childhood education: The New Education Policy 2023 has rightly highlighted the need to improve children’s development and learning experience in the early years.
Invest in quality teachers: The COVID-19 lockdown has shown all the importance of teachers and the physical classroom. We should ensure that permanent teachers with decent working conditions are present in the ratio recommended in the Right to Education Act to make schools genuinely transformative places for all children.
Create a relevant and engaging curriculum: This will help students see connections to what is taught in school, what is happening in their lives, and how they can live better lives.
Ensure parental involvement and community support: We must remember the saying that it takes a village to raise a child and ensure that parents and the whole community are part of the school’s efforts to educate their children.
Embrace technology: As we live in a fast-changing world, we must bridge the digital gap by enabling the children’s experience of changing technology, especially information and communication technology.
While these are a few things we need to emphasize in our education system, in the short term, we need campaigns and initiatives to make up for learning losses that occurred with the school closure during COVID-19. This needs to be done in campaign mode.
We have to secure several advances in children’s education and literacy by identifying and bringing back children into government schools. We can run numerous mohalla patshallas (locality schools) to ensure children remain connected with education. This kind of concerted effort is required to spread literacy in India and make every child a citizen, contributing to the welfare of all.
There is evidence to suggest that the development of language and abstract thinking are mutually reinforcing. That is, the ability to use language helps to develop conceptual thinking skills, and the ability to think abstractly helps to develop language skills.
However, it was only with civilization that literacy emerged in our world. Only with literacy could a complex society arise, and trade could develop across different cultures. We know that lists of goods being traded were the first forms of writing. The first writers wrote on tokens by impressing symbols on wet clay. The first writing was in the form of pictograms, and many later replaced images with letters. The seals of the Indus Valley Civilization show the continuity of this tradition in our country.
Literacy spread slowly in the ancient and medieval times. It was restricted to a few scribes, and in the Middle Ages, only a few cultures encouraged its spread. It was only the invention of the printing press in the 15th century that revolutionized literacy. Books were mass-produced, making them more affordable and accessible to a wider audience. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, we saw a significant push for universal literacy. This was driven by several factors, including the rise of democracy, the need for a skilled workforce, and the belief that literacy was essential for individual and social progress.
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Today, literacy rates are high in most parts of the world. However, there are still significant disparities in literacy rates between and within countries. There is also a growing concern about the digital divide, which refers to the gap between those with access to digital technologies and those without.
In India, we have a 74.04% literacy rate. However, problems abound. The 17th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), released in 2022, found that the overall enrolment rate in rural India is 98.4%, and the learning levels of children have declined significantly since the last survey in 2018. The ASER is an independent survey that monitors the progress of education in India and, in a significant way, focuses on essential reading and arithmetic skills – one could say language and math literacy.