Illiteracy: impossible to hide

Source: UNESCO

According to the latest UNESCO global report on education, more and more people know how to read and write, but 776 million adults are still illiterate. This phenomenon affects industrialized countries, where a minority of the population faces daily difficulties.

Someone in the street, on public transport or in a shopping centre, asks for directions, although everything is clearly indicated on signs. He or she seems absent-minded, very tired, or exasperated by contradictory information. Sometimes those asked for information think nothing of it. Other times, they understand: this person does not know how to read, and is making an incredible effort to hide it.
© UNESCO/Michel Ravassard
Literacy classes for immigrant workers in Bobigny (France).

Talking about illiteracy

Terminology varies. In 1958, UNESCO declared that an illiterate person was someone who could not “both read and write a short simple statement on his [or her] everyday life”. Twenty years later, UNESCO introduced the more refined concept of “functional” illiteracy, designating the inability to “read, write and calculate for his or her own and the community»s development”. Up to the 1980s, industrialized countries believed that they had eradicated the phenomenon. It was thought only migrants who had come from countries without compulsory schooling lacked mastery of the written word. This was an illusion, which technical progress has helped to dispel.

The growing scarcity of purely «manual» activities has revealed that a minority of the populations of developed countries lack basic written communication skills. There then emerged in France the new word «illetrisme» (illiteracy), as opposed to formerly used «analphabetisme» (analphabetism), the idea being to distinguish between «analphabetic», having never been to school, and «illiterate», having learnt badly or forgotten everything. But many national and international institutions sometimes used one term and sometimes the other. The two categories were inevitably mixed up, as some people had received little schooling, whereas others had acquired knowledge elsewhere than at school. Finally, there are many different levels between a complete lack of proficiency in basic skills and total proficiency. Writing a simple message phonetically or working out what a sign means are significant skills compared to total ignorance. For this reason, measuring illiteracy and comparisons between countries are difficult, as results vary enormously according to the criteria used.

The paradox of rich countries

In its 2009 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO considers that the world literacy rate for adults has risen, increasing from 76% in the period 1985-1994 to 84% in the 2000-2006. However, 776 million adults still lack minimum literacy skills. And this figure does not only concern poor countries. Despite official statistics that «generally underestimate» the phenomenon, by announcing, for example, a literacy rate of 99% in North America and in Europe, there still pockets of illiteracy and of low literacy in developed countries.

The International Adult Literacy Skills Survey (IALSS), carried out from 1994 to 1998 by the OECD and published in 2000, defined a scale of proficiency from 1 to 5, which was later used in other surveys. Level 1 designated the weakest skills and level 2 the ability to «get by» despite insufficient proficiency. But this survey sparked off a controversy. While developed countries consider that 10% of their populations have serious difficulties with writing, this survey gave much higher figures, putting 45 % of the population of Great Britain and 40 % of the population of Germany at levels 1 and 2. France, which was also rated at 40%, withdrew from the survey.

In France, the subsequent use by the Agence nationale de lutte contre l’illettrisme (ANLCI) (National agency to combat illiteracy) of a survey about «information and daily life», carried out in 2004-2005 by l’Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) (National institute for statistics and economic studies) estimated, but with different criteria, that 9% of the population aged 18 to 65 who had studied in the country were illiterate. However, for 15 to 18-year olds, the rate is much lower: only 4.5%.

The IALSS survey was controversial, yet it had the positive effect of encouraging the countries concerned to implement plans to fight illiteracy and ask serious questions about the efficiency of their educational systems, which are now measured by the PISA surveys (Programme for international student assessment), published every three years by the OECD since the year 2000. On the other hand, IALSS was not followed up. The OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is designed to make up for the lack of a common measurement tool, but its first assessments are not expected before 2011.

Netherlands: Reversing the trend

In 1994, another international adult literacy survey, (IALS), carried out in Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland, already showed the complexity of the measurement criteria. On a scale of 1 to 5, it measured three categories of skills: understanding prose, «documents» and texts with quantitative information. In these three categories, 10% of the Dutch population was no higher than level 1.

According to the Lezen & Schrijven (Read & Write) foundation, created in 2004 and chaired by Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands, 1.5 million Dutch people are at the lowest level of this scale, 1 million of whom were born and educated in the country. According to a survey by the foundation, a quarter of these are almost totally illiterate. Furthermore, 6% of salaried workers have major difficulties in reading and writing.

«Illiteracy», declared Princess Laurentien during a UNESCO regional conference in Baku (Azerbaijan) in May 2008, «is often linked to major personal problems – low self-esteem, social isolation and an inability to function independently». She concluded: «There is no silver bullet in eradicating illiteracy. We must work together to raise awareness, implement practical initiatives and measure actual results». All concerned countries are at this juncture today.

Luc Cédelle, French journalist at the newspaper Le Monde

© UNESCO