Guest essay by Eric Worrall
UNESCO has signalled that conservation and biodiversity themes must be incorporated into UN programmes to raise global literacy levels.
Message by
Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO,
on the occasion of International Literacy Day 8 September 2014
International Literacy Day, devoted this year to the connection between literacy and sustainable development, provides us with an opportunity to remember a simple truth: literacy not only changes lives, it saves them.
Literacy helps reduce poverty and enables people to find jobs and obtain higher salaries. It is one of the most efficient ways of improving the health of mothers and children, understanding doctors’ prescriptions and gaining access to healthcare. The lives of more than two million children under the age of five were saved between 1990 and 2009 thanks to improvements in the education of women of reproductive age. Literacy facilitates access to knowledge and triggers a process of empowerment and self-esteem that benefits everyone. This energy, multiplied by millions of people, is essential to the future of societies.
Today, 781 million adults worldwide cannot read, write or count. Two thirds of them are women. More than 250 million children are unable to read a single sentence, even though half of them have spent four years in school. What kind of societies do we expect to build with an illiterate youth? This is not the kind of world we wish to live In. We want a world where everyone can participate in the destiny of their societies, gain access to knowledge and enrich it in turn. To succeed, we must also change the traditional approach of literacy programmes to encompass, beyond reading and writing in the narrower sense, broader skills with regard to consumption and sustainable lifestyles, the conservation of biodiversity, poverty reduction, disaster risk reduction as well as civic participation. In these ways, literacy programmes can unlock their full transformative potential.
Commitment to these goals will be central to the forthcoming Aichi-Nagoya conference on education for sustainable development to be held in Japan this November. It will also be at the heart of the World Education Forum to be held next year in Incheon, Republic of Korea, to lead the global debate towards the adoption of new sustainable development goals at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. UNESCO is working across the world – in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal and elsewhere – to ensure that literacy is integrated into national development strategies. The Global Partnership for Girls’ and Women’s Education and the Malala Fund for Girls’ Right to Education, launched by UNESCO, also focus on literacy. The programmes acknowledged by the UNESCO-Confucius Prize for Literacy and the UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize enable us each year to celebrate innovative practices that show that achievement is within our reach. New technologies, including mobile telephones, also offer fresh opportunities for literacy for all. We must invest more, and I appeal to every Member State and all our partners to redouble efforts – political and financial – to ensure that literacy is fully recognized as one of the most powerful accelerators of sustainable development. The future we want starts with the alphabet.
Source: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002293/229343e.pdf
Whatever happened to simply teaching people how to read and write, then letting those newly empowered individuals make up their own mind what they want to read and write?
“Thank you sir may I have another”
Just in: canada to imposenationwide carbon price
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/us-canada-climatechange-idUSKCN11O0Q3?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=57def36e04d30131632cb750&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
Yeah, I am ashamed to be Canadian….
“Canuckistan” doesn’t seem so improbable these days.
Not gonna happen. Just posturing. The feds have painted themselves into a corner. First they agreed that the provinces could enact their own programs. Now they are threatening to shove a program down the throats of the provinces that don’t act. But they are completely fuzzy as to when, or how that might happen. Because it won’t. Any province that gets something shoved down their throats isn’t going to respond well at the polls. Plus, it will trigger a constitutional challenge that will take a decade to wind through the courts. There will be multiple federal elections between now and then, with increased revenue pressure on governments to get oil to market, and yet more years of duh… nothing bad is happening to the climate.
Even the brain dead NDP in Alberta are slowly figuring out that prosperity = “carbon”
Man, only if we’re right…
David – for sure not going to happen as most of the provinces already have or will have their own “carbon” pricing in place long before the Feds get their act together. Any Fed who fiddles with Provincial authority will find themselves in court for years just as you said. Governments just can’t resist the tax revenues. The Alberta NDP are proposing to put 10 billion dollars of their so called “Carbon Levy” tax into “Renewable Energy”. Just goes to show how competitive Renewables are. NOT!
Was that an accidental Joke? (Just in = Justin) 😉
Just-in is trying to butter the toast. Apparently he’ll be trying to get Canada back on the “Security Council” in 2021, promising this coming Tuesday Canada will be spending 450 million on and committing 600 troops ( plus, plus ,plus support) to “Peace Keeping”. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/justin-trudeau-united-nations-general-assembly-unga-rebranding-1.3766405.
The liberals are all blaming Canada’s problems on Harper of course , just as Obama blames everything on his predecessor. Interesting read, Harper and his government’s statements about the UN were dead on but hey I think I am preaching to the converted here.
One gets the sinister feeling that our generation is being sucked toward a new age of politically correct eco puritanism of which talebanic/IS is1am is only a foretaste. I fear for our children. I just hope they don’t follow their father’s beliefs and convictions and thus finish up on the more comfortable side of the barbed wire fences.
Please do not use the word sinister, as it is evidence of a racist attitude towards left-handed people.
Particularly on the part of the reader.
G
https://www.google.at/search?q=barbed+wire+sandwich&oq=barbed+wire+sandwich&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2.40743j0j4&client=ms-android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
With voice-to-text and text-to-voice on cheap tablets, why would one wish to read and write. It’s far easier to multitask if one is listening or talking than to read and write. The whole read/write paradigm is rapidly becoming a relic of a bygone era. Of course teaching crtitical thinking, maths and science is the key priorities.
@ur momisugly son of mulder , thanks for letting me know you are paying me your “undivided attention” when I communicate with you. What do you do when the power goes off for a few hrs or days?
Phone the power company to get them to fix it. in the meantime I’ll find the fact that i have no heating or lighting far more annoying than not being able to listen to or read Hamlet.
My AT&T telephone has TtoV and VtoT, and everything come out of the microphone as Gibberish.
That’s the language spoken by the Siamang tribes in a remote valley in Borneo.
Can’t understand a thing. It can’t even say AT&T intelligibly.
G
Unix derived by AT&T – classic:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
are the key priorities.
The UN does not want people to be educated, they want them to be brainwashed with Global Warming/Climate Change propaganda, making them compliant to directives. Educated people think for themselves and study the facts to make good decisions, which will lead to UN foolishness being rejected. The UN does not want that!
781 million adults plus 250 million children. Using a world population of 6 billion, that’s just over 17% of the population being illiterate.
In 1950 it was 64%.
Not saying the job is done, just saying drop the doom and gloom for a moment and see how far we have come. Going one step further, the largest illiteracy rates most likely occur in corrupt dictatorships and failed states. Not much point in teaching them sustainability when their only goal each and every day is survival. This is a great way for the UN to distract attention from its monumental failure in the third world.
damn David….that was a good one!
Yup, yup. Here here.
Only Deniers and Deplorables would criticize this spot-on UN initiative. What? Global Literacy? I thought it was Global Lunacy. My bad.
http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/4270/1318/original.jpg
Well it obviously isn’t water, so I guess it must be straight Vodka.
G
They want people to read so they can indoctrinate people with all the garbage they want them to read and then turn around and write reports to spread the propaganda.
I thought we didnt have religion in schools unless the parents signed up for it
“Today, 781 million adults worldwide cannot read, write or count. Two thirds of them are women.”
It will be interesting how UNESCO decides to address the disparate number of illiterate women. Will they be adopting resolutions that require certain Middle Eastern countries to start providing schooling for girls?
One of the most intelligent people I ever had the privilege to meet was illiterate. He was a village orator in PNG. Had a photographic memory. When an occasion occurred that required the creation a community secretary, he was elected to the job. He had an assistant secretary who had been to high school and could read and write. On the other hand, maybe it was a bit of a scam? He could speak at least 6 languages, but most people could do that. I asked him why he hadn’t learned to read and write. The answer was “I don’t need to do I”.
So we found something where women are the leaders.
g
The UN is a grubby mess and frankly a danger to any form of participatory democracy. To paraphrase “you have sat here for far to long for any good you’ve done”
It should be dissolved or at a minimum booted out of the US. They would not miss us and we would not miss them.
The headline on this post reads: “UNESCO: We Must Redesign Global Literacy Programmes to Incorporate our Climate Propaganda”
The highlighted relevant text reads: “…we must also change the traditional approach of literacy programmes to encompass, beyond reading and writing in the narrower sense, broader skills with regard to consumption and sustainable lifestyles, the conservation of biodiversity…”
Where in that text is climate propaganda mentioned? The answer – not at all. How is conservation and maintaining biodiversity a bad thing?
As far as the conclusion to teach people to read and let them make their own decisions – yeah, that’s worked very well so far for elephant populations, rhinos and the vast regions of old growth rainforest that have been felled to grown palm oil.
Our propaganda isn’t working. So we must incorporate our propaganda into more products.
“Today, 781 million adults worldwide cannot read, write or count”
You can say that again but it’s not just a third world problem-
http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/04/germanys-energiewende-leading-to-suicide-by-cannibalism-huge-oversupply-risks-destabilization/#sthash.egdONA1X.dpbs
Reading and writing ability never made it.
Look at green belivers – ‘social competence’ does it.
In order to achieve sustainable development through literacy to fight climate change, poverty and so on the world leaders should put their heads together, provide platforms for women to raise their voice. Education should be given priority…and women the educators..