A person once mentioned to me that Mongolia has one of the highest rates of literacy of anywhere in the world. I am not sure where the statistic came from; if it comes the 80's we should understand that many good statistics were exaggerated during that decade.
In my short eight years in Mongolia, I have only met one Mongolian who had trouble reading. The language is very regular and the orthography is so easy that you could learn to sound out Mongolian words rather quickly. The difficulty lies in understanding what one is reading.
Regardless of the literacy rate, Mongolians do not spend much time reading, and the ones who do read often spend much of their time reading cheap, sensational newspapers with stories of people who have sold their organs to feed their families and the like.
History tells us that most of the schools founded in the British colonies in the 17th century were started to teach children how to read the Bible. Almost all of the colleges were founded to train theology students. That is no longer the purpose of education today for a majority of Americans. What do you use your literacy to read?
No comments:
Post a Comment