Reading the Past, Writing the Future

Next Thursday September 8 is the golden jubilee of the International Literacy Day proclaimed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). The theme of this gold-letter day is, “Reading the Past, Writing the Future”. According to UNESCO, this event celebrates and honours the past five decades of national and international engagement, efforts and progress made to increase literacy rates around the world. It also addresses current challenges and looks to innovative solutions to further boost literacy in the future. Literacy is seen as an instrument to empower individuals, communities and societies.  

UNESCO says this is the first year of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In this context, the vision of literacy is aligned with lifelong learning opportunities with special focus on youth and adults. Literacy is a part of Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. The target is that by 2030, all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy. A Global Alliance for Literacy (GAL) will also be formed this year with the aim of making all major stakeholders pull together to promote literacy as a foundation for lifelong learning.  

In Sri Lanka, the national government has outlined a long term policy to restructure and reorient the current exam-based education system. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and other government leaders have promised that in line with the new UNESCO vision, Sri Lanka’s new quality education process will also be all inclusive and equitable while promoting lifelong education not only from books but from other people, events and situations. It is in line with what great philosophers have regularly told us, the day we stop learning even at the age of 80 is the day we begin to stagnate or mentally die. 

As a first step the National Government has doubled the allocation for education, though some trade union and other experts question the validity of this claim. In another important step towards dismantling the high pressure exam-oriented system, many experts hope the government will cancel the grade 5 scholarship examination. The teaching of the English language and information and communication technology in city, urban and most importantly in rural areas is to be given high priority in the new education vision and goals. Premier Wickremasinghe who is overseeing this transformation or what he describes as a revolution in the education system, says the plan is intended to enable young people to continue their education for vocational training for at least 13 years, whatever their results at the GCE O/L or A/L examinations.   

With the SLFP celebrating its 65th anniversary yesterday, most analysts give it the credit of ushering in a peaceful people’s revolution in 1956. But one of its major negatives, which even was one of the causes of the devastating 30 year war, was the largely election-oriented language policy which included the scrapping of the English medium in schools. At that time Sri Lanka was admired as having the highest English standards in Asia but 60 years later, we have come to a level where even some English tuition masters find it difficult to match the subject and the verb in a simple sentence.

 
 In terms of a solution, one of the important factors is to encourage young people specially to get back to the reading habit. Room to Read, a global organization focused on Literacy publicly shared the trends and evaluations of early grade reading in Sri Lanka. According to data collected at the conclusion of the evaluation in October last year, it was revealed that the programme had a large impact on the development of pupil’s reading skills after two academic years. This was a programme conducted in Sinhala and Tamil languages and we hope a similar programme could be conducted in the English language also so that our children will be able to fluently read the past and write the future.