Reading and the need of reading

Writing this I live for some time in Goa in India and here I daily can watch the consequences of too little education. Literacy is low, at the best at 95 % in some states, at the worst down on 60 % in others. Destitute people, but also very poor families, force their children to work instead of going to school.

The illiterate is forced to pay for reading and writing with money they don’t have. This puts her outside the society with no knowledge of her rights and responsibilities. The law about free school for all children in eight years, including books and material, school lunch and school uniform goes for all children since 2010, but is only practised to them actually sending their children to school. If you don’t know about the possibilities, life goes on like before the law.

There is a great need for the society to reach out with information to all citizens about all these rights and responsibilities. In Europe, we use mass media and inform most people in short time. Here in India you slowly keep on for years before you have reached the half of the people.

A couple of TV channels with messages from the authorities is drowning in the commercial flow of in most other channels and knowledge through the internet is only reaching those who really came to school and then found the way to a modern library, often far away from where they live. The motorbikes of the middle class maybe reach them, but never the computer and the internet. The mobile phone reaches them, maybe even a smartphone sometimes. But they never reach the knowledge of the world. Some maybe find music and other things on YouTube. That is it.

It is no problem for India to get employees to all positions in the bureaucracy. The universities and the high schools are producing 500 000 examined students every year, far more than the need. The reason is actually that 67 % are still in the agricultural sector, almost left to what it always has been. Free from income tax, but also free from development. If the modernisation of the agricultural sector would be increased, even more people would be sent off to the cities.

Simplified you could say that India is hold back by the fact that they are too many. If everything is running as it is now, very few suffer from hunger. When the Western countries left the agricultural society for the industrialisation and later to the information society, India was left behind with its old farming systems. But also, that the middleclass parts of India moved slowly after the Western countries and left the rest of India far behind. If they succeeded the decrease the population, especially in the poor parts, there would be more space for the modernization of the agricultural sector. 

Now this although is coming more than wanted, by different reasons and making people losing the possibilities to live on what the earth give them.

But the modernization and the use of machines need education of the workers, other than earlier generation can tell coming generations about.

Poverty is made from some different factors. One of them is that there are too many people local and global. Another factor is the level of education and the skills. A third is the way plans and order work out in society. A fourth is for sure what you think is possible. Because man can do a lot of progress, as long no one shoot her, and she finds enough to eat and water to drink.

As long you all the time learn to keep on with what you did earlier, it is hard to look through what you have to do to meet the changes around you. Do you yourself know how the society will be around you in twenty-five years? Think back twenty-five years and tell me what it was like.

In my personal Crystal ball, we might be in the robot society in twenty-five years. 

Enormous lot of people have lost their jobs in the sectors of transportation and factories. Technically it can be done today. Some factories work with only lots of robots and are producing with precision and in a very high speed.

Autopods (automatic vehicles) with local intelligence and local traffic flow control would very fast be put into traffic for all kinds of transportation. It is actually legal in Great Britain and in some states in the USA. Testing in real traffic in large scale is going on in most Western countries.

To continue the possible list of everything that soon can be started in the robot society is not especially interesting, because there is still something missing. There is a need for international agreements and common decisions about transnational systems. Because the autopods can’t be stopped by boarders, that they only can operate in specific country. That would rise the costs much for the robot society.

We can only wait for the decisions of the politicians. They are on the other hand held back by all those threaten in the society of today. Among them the car industry. Who would put money on an expensive car if it only can be driven automatically in the same speed as all other cars? Do you know have many years the Kodak company succeeded to hold back digital photos by buying all the patents?

In the Western countries, we are not held back by lack of education and to low literacy. Picture yourself leading India into the robot society. What would you do with all the people? What occupations do you invent or reinvent? How long will take to get people to realize that they can’t go by themselves on the big roads?

Still, the most likely scenario will be that India will pass the educational problems and rather quick enter the robot society before 2100. But that will rely on good planning from you. Are you ready to take over?

Without commenting the robot society around the corner, many are worried about the writing and reading in the future. Some doubt that the school can give the students enough knowledge and skills in the future. The school has moreover moved into the communication society and is very fast changing now. It is leaving the books out of paper behind.

Exactly that change is what worries some of the watchers. The pupils will be able to watch YouTube films all the time and don’t need to write and read. Well, In reality the students meet a lot more text on the internet. But the tools to take care of that are there. There will for sure be a rise of the skills for most of the students. The cheating students will be fooling themselves.

It’s no longer the rivers and small towns of Sweden to learn, but the understanding of the geography and the landscape and the nature and how to present this information in the best way that is focused. Knowledge and skills for the information society they grow up into.

Sometimes it’s the results of the education measured by the international tests for different stages that upset. Here you find that it is always the question that makes the answer. One common example is that Finland in Sweden is held for being better than Sweden in education of English, out of the known results in the tests.

Now, knowledge and skills in a language is much a communicative skill, which the school has big difficulties with through the way the school work. Skipping the communication, the school goes on with theoretically with grammar studies and glossary work and others that makes it possible for the teacher to in detail control what is happening in the classroom and also be able to measure the results and put grades to what the teacher sees.

This form of ”education” most often leave very little after by the students. If you check what they have learnt some years after school, very little remain. In fact, nothing you can call a language. Three years of study of a language often give you less than what you pick up from an intensive week with contact on Skype.

Back to the education in English in Sweden and Finland. If you ever happen to been visiting Finland and tried to talk English with anyone, you know that it’s almost impossible to find anyone who can talk English with you. In Sweden, on the other hand, you can talk English with all kids in the preschool, the school, all grownups and even in the homes for elderly people. Out of that comes that the Swedish school is much better than the Finnish school with education in English!

NOT AT ALL! You don’t learn English in school, or any other language. Please go back three paragraphs and read them again, so that you follow better!

The difference between Sweden and Holland on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other, is that our countries do not dub the programs in English in TV or in the cinemas. Our countries build up English for the whole population through films and others on TV.

That is the simple trick that put skills in English to all Swedes that the whole society gain. We don’t dub French or German or any other language films either, so probably people in Sweden learn more French and German in front of the TV than in the classrooms! Show me only one baby that learns one of its languages through grammatical discussions with its parents! Some glossary is of course needed, but it’s by communicating you learn a language and the words are understood in a context.

Don’t the students need to learn to write and read, learning a language? Yes, but sometime we can be very sure that the egg comes before the hen. Buy an egg directly from a farmer with free living hen, if you don’t believe me. During the communication you sometimes get trouble finding words for what you want to express.

I am sure you have been in a shop or wanted to ask for help showing you the way somewhere and been searching for words in that foreign language. Then you just start the app on your smartphone and say the word in your language and out comes it in that tough language. Spasibo, nice smartphone! And every little child knows how to do it. You don’t need any glossary test to learn that. And no teachers either.

The roll of the teacher is initially to be more the leader of funny things in the target language, like singing and playing games to help the students to discover the more exact sounds of the target language, and the rhythms and the melody and such things we use to describe a certain language.

Later, when the student is more skilled in talking and writing and reading, we need the skills of the teacher to shape a better language, like we love to help the students with in their native languages. But reading by interest will always be more important than education in the classroom. It’s also the only way to spelling skills in the target language. Teachers training the students in the classroom in spelling activities are wasting time.

For sure, we need competences in writing and reading in the future. Besides that, I also hope and wish for a better life for the illiterate.

Let us return to India and it’s 325 languages and a lot of children that still don’t attend any school. It’s easy to see that India has an unrealistic view of what language education can do in a classroom. The same unrealistic view most educational governments all over the world show up!

English is one of the central languages in India and very important för trade and higher education. Still very few Indians speak English, normally only a few glossaries in contact with tourists. Even fewer can write and read English. If India used the child programs on TV to help the next generations with their English, giving them a ground for talking, writing and reading and easy calculating with English, the children would do the rest on their own, like in Sweden and Holland.

If only the kids like it and think it’s fun!

Goa the 14th of January 2017

Lennart Warenius

PS. Remember to comment my texts here or directly to lennart.warenius@hotmail.com. DS.