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Comments
to the text: ADULT LITERACY
NOTES FOR DISCUSSION
by Sérgio Haddad
The text presented by Cecilia Soriano and ASPBAE is rather complete and very
good, being easy to understand for the Latin American reality. In the
diagnosis part many Latin American countries can be included, such as Brazil,
together with the ones of the Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia. However, as a
general comment, the text works making reference to EFA goals when it could
also work, mainly, in dialogue with Hamburg Declaration and the
Agenda for
the Future.
Some comments:
1. There still exist, in many countries, programmes to teach literacy to
adults with characteristics of campaign, even when this method has already
been criticized for its inefficiency. These programmes, designed to work for
some months, shortened, with facilitators who lack the necessary training,
many of whom are volunteers with low incomes, working in inappropriate
facilities, with training unique materials that does not take into account
the diversity of the learners, have not realized they have to fulfil the
task of increasing de training capacity of young and adults. We should avoid
referring naturally to the vision of literacy as restricted, switched off
from basic education, from “traditional” six-month literacy programs. I
believe we have to be affirmative, to have a broader vision of literacy,
switched to basic education and to what the text names “education for life”.
2. In some Latin American countries we are registering a new phenomenon, a
new type of exclusion. In the last decades a great effort was done to extend
the access to children and young people into regular systems of education,
as a result of the pressure to democratize educational opportunities, mainly
after military dictatorships’ periods. This phenomenon appears in times of
neoliberal policies that produce this wide offer without an increase of
adequate resources. Thus, the number of students by class increased, the
amount of frequency hours diminished, and the number of shifts went up;
teachers lost purchasing power, material and pedagogical conditions in
schools became precarious. All these factors contributed for the school to
receive more students, but having a strong impact in educational quality
offered. As a consequence, at present, children go to school but they do not
learn. This is a new kind of exclusion; it is no longer that access is
denied but that educational services offered are precarious. What it is
offered is a poor school for poor people. This will have an impact over
literacy rates of young and adult people, as we should no longer consider
only those people who never went to school but also those who did go but
didn't learn, even having 4, 6, 8 year of schooling. In conclusion, if a
wider offer of regular education has helped to diminish “absolute illiteracy”
rates, we have to emphasize that the number of “functional illiterate”
people increases.
3. It is very important the comment on
point 2 on who these students of adults literacy programs are. It is
necessary to recognize the historical subjects that make up literacy classes
in their conditions of people who demand rights, as before being bearers of
shattered school paths these people have perverse paths of social exclusion,
they live paths of denial of basic human rights to life, to feeding, to
housing, to work. But to continue, besides shortages, whether material or of
symbolic assets like in the case of education, it is necessary to recognize
as well that these literacy subjects are men and women who have a role
within the society they live in, full of different paths of conquests and
failures, that make up the historical subjects they are.
Thus, to recognize this active characteristic of the subjects is to
recognize that beyond the path of shortage there is a path of conquest and
fight that is part of everyday life of popular sectors that determine the
historical reasons for the building of the societies they live in. Even if
most of the students belong to the poorer sectors of the population, there
are other factors, apart from the socioeconomic ones, that contribute to
diversify or to take into account certain characteristics of literacy
courses’ students: their gender, ethnics, if the school is urban or rural,
if the student has any handicap, and so many other characteristics that make
the human being to be recognized as such in his composition of diversities.
And there is also the history of each person or each group within the
context of social struggles, their forms of organization and the defence of
groups on interest. A new vision of the literacy subject has, as an
explanation, a new form of consideration, where the effective participation
of learners is a basic principle of schooling processes, curricula, school
organization, granting that school models are produced and reproduce as a
result of this participative action.
4. Another important topic addressed in the debate on administration, on
point Nº7, is the one about the role of the state and the civil society.
Schooling processes demand institutionality and universality. Only the State
is in a position to offer these conditions with quality to everyone. However,
in some circumstances, civil society can have a very important role. These
circumstances can happen due to the proximity of certain entities of civil
society and social movements with learners. This proximity is a facilitating
element for men and women – who traditionally have a history of difficulties
or of lack of familiarity with literacy centres - to get closer and
participate in literacy programs.
Under these circumstances, the literacy
offer presented by these entities can be a strong factor of encouragement
for participants. At the same time, programs offered by social movements or
entities that strongly identify with certain social groups, or that are even
made up of people coming from the same cultural universe of learners, have
strong reasons to keep such programs as a way of struggle for
acknowledgement, preservation and valuation of the diversity of these social
groups. Indigenous schools, rural movements, afro groups (“quilombolas”),
urban social movements, among others, are some examples of this kind of
educational practice. It is also the civil society that has to control and
monitor in order that governmental sectors assume their responsibilities. I
would also like to mention in point 7, when it refers to financing, the
importance of the role of international cooperation that should contribute
with the poorest governments in this task of implementing the human right to
schooling.
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