Today is International Literacy Day

Today is International Literacy Day. It's a day designated by the United Nations, and it was first celebrated in 1966. The point is to make sure that literacy remains a high priority on the agendas of each country — and for the whole world at large. UNESCO points out, "Today one in five adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women." Literacy campaigns are now often linked to women's rights movements.

There's a multi-million dollar literacy campaign taking place right now in central California, in Monterey County. It's a county that houses fancy beachside communities like Carmel-by-the-Sea, but at the beginning of this decade, one-fourth of adults in Monterey County were below a fourth-grade reading level. And so a big literacy campaign was organized, and in 2006 it was launched, funded by private charitable donors. There are free classes in reading, English, and math for adults all over the county — lots of classes, at lots of times, in lots of locations. The campaign's motto is "Literacy is essential to freedom, and change is essential to literacy." There are a number of similar community literacy campaigns around the United States.

One of the most successful literacy campaigns in the history of the world took place in 1961 in Cuba when 24 percent of the population was illiterate. By December of that same year, only 4 percent was. Today, the U.N. lists Cuba has as having the second-highest literacy rate in the world, after the country of Georgia. The United States ties for 21st place with Canada and several northern European countries.

About one million people were involved in the Cuban literacy campaign: 270,000 as teachers, and the rest as learners. It was a highly organized and regimented effort. There were 100,000 middle schoolers and high schoolers who left school for eight months to live in the countryside as volunteer teachers. In the cities, literate adults taught their illiterate neighbors in classes that took place after business hours. There was a group of 15,000 teachers called the "Fatherland or Death" brigade, who left their salaried professional jobs and went out to the countryside to teach.

The government provided the books, which tended to be about the history of the Revolution and all of its socialist ideals. One of the instructional texts was a pamphlet Fidel Castro had written while imprisoned after his first failed attempt at revolution; it's called History Will Absolve Me (1953).