Why is literacy important unesco 2010

Towards the end of the 19th century the share had increased to almost three-quarters for both genders. As the center of the Industrial Revolution and one of the first countries that established democratic institutions, England was in important aspects the center of the development of modernity.

The data shows that improvements in literacy preceded the Industrial Revolution and in many ways the rise of living standards became only possible thanks to an increasingly better educated public. Economic growth is possible when we better understand how to produce the things we need, and translate these insights into technological improvements that allow us to produce them more efficiently. Both the development of new technologies innovation and their use in production relied on a much better-educated population.

Widespread school education and even basic skills like literacy are a very recent achievement that was enabled and at the same time required by the progress achieved in recent generations. The visualization shows, in two panels, a side-by-side comparison of long-term trends in school attendance and literacy. We can see that in only one in four people in the world attended school, and this meant that only one in five were able to read.

And global inequalities in access to education were very large. Over the course of the 19th century global literacy more than doubled.

And over the course of the 20th century the world achieved rapid progress in education. More than 4 out of 5 people are now able to read.

Young generations are better educated than ever before. The expansion of literacy in early-industrialized countries helped reduce within-country inequalities.

In the preceding visualization we showed that England virtually closed literacy gender gaps by Here we provide evidence of literacy gaps across races in the US.

The following visualization shows illiteracy rates by race for the period As we can see, in order to reach near universal levels of literacy, the US had to close the race gap. This was eventually achieved around As pointed out above, Europe pioneered the expansion of basic education — but global literacy rates only started really climbing in the second half of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority.

Here we present evidence of important recent achievements in Latin America, where literacy has dramatically increased in the past century. As it can be seen, many nations have gained percentage points in literacy during this period. Despite these improvements, however, there is still a wide disparity between nations.

Here you can see that, at the turn of the 21st century, half of the population in poor countries such as Haiti remains illiterate. This motivates the next visualization, where we discuss cross-country heterogeneity in more detail. To assess the extent to which progress can be expected in the years to come, it is convenient to break down literacy estimates by age groups. As it can be seen, in the majority of nations there is a large difference in literacy rates across generations you can change the map to show literacy rates for different groups by clicking on the corresponding buttons at the top.

These large differences across generations point to a global trend: the high literacy rate among the youth indicates that as time passes, the literacy rate for the overall population will continue to increase. We highlighted above the fact that most low and middle income countries feature large differences in literacy rates across generations.

The visualization shows specifically how remarkably large these differences are in Northern Africa and the Middle East. The scatter plot emphasises the point already made. As you can see, younger generations are more likely to be literate than older generations around the world. And in some countries the gaps are dramatic. In the chart you can use the slider at the bottom to check how these generational gaps have been changing in recent decades.

You can see that throughout Africa the changes have been mainly horizontal i. It has been reported that among some disadvantaged cases in rural areas, rates are as low as 4 to 10 per cent. Urban areas have recorded a literacy rate of 73 per cent, but only reaching 43 per cent on average in rural areas.

Penny met with Jessica weekly and provided her with a ROMBi, asking her to do a puzzle a day and to write any changes that she noted in a journal. Since then, she reported:. For intelligence and capability to find expression in organised, coherent, creative forms, learners regardless of age need access to relevant structures within their tangible experience.

Regular usage of ROMBi can provide those structures and allows common terms of reference for teachers and learners engaging with key challenges including, wellbeing, personal development, inclusion, behaviour, conflict, intellectual and practical development. Since then, she reported: Becoming able to read for the first time, as her visual perception stabilised — from the first week; Her spelling began similar early improvement, the spellchecker now recognises her attempts. She is seeing things differently, her mood has improved, she can manage her relationships with others better, and is developing her ability to plan and organise.

In thinking about wisdom, it helps to read about wisdom, about Solomon or Socrates or whomever. Likewise, goodness and happiness and love.

To decide whether you have them or want to make the sacrifices necessary to get them, it is useful to read about them. We need a radical redefinition of what it means for society to have all the appearances of literacy and yet to abandon the book as its dominant metaphor. We must understand what happens when the computer replaces the book as the prime metaphor for visualizing the self.

That literacy provides them the profound power of choosing their ideational repertoire. No such choice or power is available to the illiterate young person subjected to an endless stream of electronic images.

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