Literacy the key to success

IT is disappointing nothing significant was held yesterday in the country to mark Sept 8 – International Literacy Day.
Literacy is the ability to read and write.
This day is celebrated annually to raise awareness globally on the issues surrounding adult and child literacy.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) defines literacy as the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.
Literacy is critical to economic development as well as individual and community well-being.
Our economy is enhanced when learners have higher literacy levels.
Shocking numbers of children in PNG leave primary school unable to read properly.
Like other developing countries PNG’s development challenges are huge.
With the current population of over 8 million and growing at more than two per cent annually, 85 per cent of the population live in hard to reach isolated areas, health indicators are below neighbouring countries.
In view of the challenges, providing literacy is at the heart of human development and lifelong learning to alleviate poverty by building and empowering capacities of individuals and communities to achieve many development goals.
Right now in PNG, education policymakers have been trying to find ways of raising achievement across the board for the past 30 years, with mixed success and unintended consequences for teaching methods.
The combination of the highly specified and often very demanding national curriculum and new exam grading scales are leaving teachers feeling disempowered and educationalists warning of the risk the changes pose to skills such as understanding and creativity, the two key attributes distinguishing people from robots.
Under the 2022 theme of ‘Transforming Literacy Learning Spaces”, the focus is getting people to rethink the fundamental importance of literacy learning spaces to build resilience and ensure quality, equitable, and inclusive education for all individuals around the globe.
The message is clear – without literacy or education, individuals would not be able to support themselves as societal beings.
Digital learning exists mostly online, while traditional learning takes place in a classroom building. Technology to complete tasks in everyday life.
The concept of literacy has evolved in meaning.
The key to literacy is reading development, a progression of skills that begins with the ability to understand spoken words and decode written words, and culminates in the deep understanding of text.
Some say to be illiterate is not like being deprived of television, or any other medium. It is more like being deaf, or being deprived of music.
Literacy supplies a whole mode of thought.
One cannot do without knowledge. But knowing how to use it matters too.
Literacy does not just give us access to knowledge of facts or skills. Some skills and some facts can more easily be taught with pictures or video, and some things can only be learned by practice.
The ability to read allows a person to unlock a world of possibilities. Literacy improves economic, psychological, social, and physical well-being. … Empowering people to teach themselves to read changes lives.
The purpose of universal literacy is to make better people, capable of richer lives, and able to enter fully into society, in dialogue not just with their contemporaries but with the community of everyone who has written in the languages they speak.
The development of individuals, families, communities and the country therefore depend largely on the literacy level of its population.