National Literacy Campaigns and Movements

Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Jose Carlos Chiaramonte, Robert Arnove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351503679
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Major campaigns to raise levels of literacy have taken place for centuries and share many common elements. But despite literary campaigns spanning over five decades, 860 million adults still lack minimal ability to read, write, and calculate. Why is literacy of such great importance and why have so many years of campaigning for it not been successful in fully overcoming this obstacle? "National Literacy Campaigns and Movements" explores these questions by examining campaigns in vastly different societies from a historical and comparative perspective.The volume focuses on literacy movements from the past, including those of Reformation Germany, early modern Sweden and Scotland, nineteenth-century United States, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union, pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary China, and Tanzania, Cuba, Nicaragua, and India. Contributors analyze literacy goals and outcomes in specific contexts. The editors distinguish quantitative and qualitative dimensions of literacy activities, such as the difference between the spread of literacy and patterns of its use. The common enterprise of this book is to expand upon the contributors' previous research to include a comparative dimension.This book offers the first systematic attempt to examine, critically and comparatively, the concepts and facts of large-scale literacy campaigns in more than a dozen societies over nearly five-hundred years. It offers a valuable historical lesson not only for historians, but also for educators: that instead of concentrating only on the recent period, we should use the vast and complex history of literacy movements to shed understanding on the present and future of literacy. A major new introduction to this edition asserts recent literary campaigns and the lessons provided by their success and failures. It also describes how the focus of some movements has evolved.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

ROBERT F. ARNOVE AND HARVEY J. GRAFF

History has shown that, up to the present time, revolutionary regimes have been the only ones capable of organizing successful mass literacy campaigns. From the Soviet Union to China, from Vietnam to Cuba, all revolutionary governments have given high priority to the war on illiteracy. ¹

The magnitude of the problem in many countries calls for massive efforts. Only specific campaigns with clearly defined targets can create the sense of urgency, mobilize popular support and marshal all possible resources to sustain mass actions, continuity, and follow-up.²

The idea of a campaign to promote massive and rapid increases in rates of literacy is not unique to the twentieth century. We contend, and this work illustrates, that major and largely successful campaigns to raise levels of literacy have taken place over the past four hundred years from the time of the Protestant Reformations, and that they share common elements. Our belief is that contemporary literacy campaigns can be better understood in a historical and comparative perspective.

Historically, large-scale efforts to provide literacy have not been tied to the level of wealth, industrialization, urbanization, or democratization of a society, nor to a particular type of political regime. Instead, they have been more closely related to efforts of centralizing authorities to establish a moral or political consensus, and over the past two hundred years, to nation-state building.³

What may be said of literacy campaigns is that, both historically and comparatively, they have formed part of larger transformations in societies. These transformations have attempted to integrate individuals into more comprehensive political and/or religious communities. They have involved the mobilization of large numbers of learners and teachers by centralizing authorities, who have used elements of both compulsion and social pressure to propagate a particular doctrine.

Campaigns, since the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century in Western Europe, have used a variety of media and specially developed materials, commonly involving a special cosmology of symbols, martyrs, and heroes. They often have been initiated and sustained by charismatic leaders and usually depend on a special "strike force" of teachers to disseminate a particular faith or world view.

A belief in the efficacy of literacy and the printed word itself has been an article of faith. Then as now, reformers and idealists, shakers and movers of societies and historical periods, have viewed literacy as a means to other ends— whether a more moral society or a more stable political order. No less today than four hundred years ago, individuals have sought and used literacy to attain their own goals.

In the twentieth century, particularly during the period from 1960 on, pronouncements about literacy deem it a process of critical consciousness-raising and human liberation. Just as frequently, such declarations refer to literacy, not as an end itself, but as a means to other goals—to the ends of national development and to a social order that elites, both national and international, define.⁴

This work examines continuities as well as changes in literacy campaigns over the past four hundred years. It also points to persisting issues related to literacy campaigns, their goals, organization, processes, and outcomes. The overarching goal of this work is a historically, comparatively, and dialectically based reconceptualization of the idea of a literacy campaign. By implication, we also call for a reconceptualization of literacy in theory and practice.

The Idea of a Campaign

In a Unesco-commissioned review of twentieth century national literacy campaigns, H.S. Bhola defines the literacy campaign as "a mass approach that seeks to make all adult men and women in a nation literate within a particular time frame. Literacy is seen as a means to a comprehensive set of ends—economic, social-structural, and political." According to Bhola, "a campaign suggests urgency and combativeness; it is in the nature of an expectation; it is something of a crusade." Sometimes, this becomes the moral equivalent of war. By contrast, a " 'literacy program', which even though planned, systematic and designed-by-objectives, may lack both urgency and passionate fervor."⁵

Although a limited time frame is considered to be a defining characteristic of a mass campaign, those national cases frequently pointed to as exemplars of twentieth-century literacy mobilizations commonly took two or more decades. Bhola's examples include the USSR (1919—1939), Vietnam (1945—1977), the People's Republic of China (1950s-1980s), Burma 1960s-1980s), Brazil (1967-1980), and Tanzania (1971—1981). Only the Cuban literacy campaign spanned a period of one year or less. The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade of 1980, not studied by Bhola, lasted but a brief five months. Despite the variable time spans, they all had "an intensity of purpose expressed in a series of mobilizations and were highly combative in trying to achieve their goals."⁶

What distinguishes twentieth century literacy campaigns from earlier educational movements (such as those of Germany, Sweden, and Scotland, which spanned over two hundred years) is the telescoped period of time in which the mobilizations occurred, stemming from the fact that political power can be more effectively centralized than in earlier periods. The transformation of communications, including electronic technologies and economies of scale in the publishing industry, further facilitates printing and dissemination of literacy texts, and transmission of messages and symbols relating to a campaign. The combination of technology and concentration of political power also may portend greater opportunities for the monitoring of, and social control over, the uses of literacy.

There also are international dimensions to the types of literacy activities characterizing the second half of the twentieth century, and increasing opportunities for countries to learn from one another. Despite these differences, the similarities between literacy campaigns over the past four hundred years are strongly evident. Insufficiently recognized among these similarities is the increasing tendency of countries to borrow from other campaigns, a process of mimesis. This is what Graff terms the "legacies of literacy."

In the following pages, we review similarities between contemporary campaigns and the literacy drives and movements of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. The characteristics on which we focus are the contexts, goals, mechanisms, organization, materials and methods, teachers, and consequences of campaigns. Another important common feature is the relationship between literacy efforts and the institutionalization of schooling. The chapters contained in this book place literacy efforts in historical context while also searching for common patterns over time and across different social, economic, and political configurations. Theorists and planners of literacy campaigns may learn much of value from these patterns, from the past successes and failures documented in the national case studies.

Context and Triggering Events

Historically, the initiation of a literacy campaign has been associated with major transformations in social structures and belief systems. Typically, such campaigns have been preceded and accompanied by more gradual changes, such as the spread of religious doctrine, the growth of market economies, the rise of bureaucratic and legal organizations, and the emergence of national political communities. But usually there is a profound, if not cataclysmic, triggering event: a religious reformation or a political revolution, the gaining of political independence and nationhood.

The German, Swedish, and Scottish campaigns from the middle of the sixteenth century were intimately connected to the Protestant Reformations and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation. In the German case, the Treaty of Augsburg of 1555 established that the religious preference of the ruling elite of each city or territory determined whether the population of that political entity would adhere to the Catholic or the Lutheran Church. Shortly thereafter, the Catholic Church, reinvigorated by the Council of Trent and the founding of the Order of Jesuits, responded to the threat of religious heterodoxy. According to Gawthrop, the Protestant rulers, in conjunction with religious authorities, systematically set out to establish schools "to indoctrinate the general population and thereby ensure religious conformity."

For Scotland, the Reformation of the 1560s is described by Houston as a political event with religious overtones. Anti-French and anti-Catholic nobility, concerned with the establishment and protection of their faith, advocated a national effort to educate the population in the principles of Protestantism.

Literacy efforts in Sweden, according to Johansson, must also be understood in the context of the Protestant Reformation. The Swedish experience should be taken as part of a process of nation building following a series of great wars. Military defeat contributed to renewed emphasis on mass literacy in Prussia in 1807, France in 1871,⁷ and Russia in 1905.

Literacy efforts in the nineteenth century, for example in the United States, represent a convergence of various social forces and widely held beliefs: the competition of various religious denominations to capture souls, and a belief in republican government, with its need for an educated citizenry. But a key catalyst was the extension of the franchise to the working class during the first three decades of the century, a trend which coincides with the beginning of the common school movement.

In Russia, the abolition of serfdom in 1861 unleashed enormous energies, both at the local and state levels, that were channeled into literacy activities. At the same time, national elites, of both progressive and conservative tendencies, began to make linkages between literacy and the process of modernization and the strengthening of the Russian State.⁸

The campaigns of the twentieth century are usually associated with revolutionary upheavals and attempts by state authorities to create a new political culture and accelerate the process of economic development. The most striking cases of massive mobilization that pivot on the provision of literacy and adult education are the USSR, following the October 1917 revolution; the People's Republic of China, following the 1949 "liberation"; Cuba, following its 1959 revolution; and Nicaragua, after the "triumph" of 1979. Other notable cases involving large-scale literacy as part of the struggle for independence from colonial domination include Vietnam from 1945 on, and the actual attainment of independence followed by the restructuring of a society in accordance with a new model of development—Tanzania after 1967.⁹

The wealth and resources of a country have not been the critical factor in shaping the scope and intensity of a war on ignorance. Rather, the political will of national leaders to effect dramatic changes in personal beliefs, individual and group behaviors, and major institutions emerges as the key factor. Cases in which a strong political will has been lacking include India, with approximately one-half of the world's more than 800 million illiterate adults, and the advanced industrialized countries of the U.S., the U.K., and France, which, according to Limage, have profound illiteracy problems.¹⁰

Goals

The transformations that provide the context for most mass literacy campaigns usually embrace the formation of a new type of person in a qualitatively different society. In the contemporary period, there is frequent reference, for example, to the creation of the "New Socialist Man [Woman],"¹¹ in a society organized according to principles of cooperation, egalitarianism, altruism, sacrifice, and struggle (the USSR, the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua). In the period of the great Protestant reforms, educational goals were joined, according to Strauss, "to that grand design of a spiritual renewal of state, society, and individual which endowed earlier Lutheranism with its strongest source of appeal."¹² The Lutheran Reformation in Germany, Strauss continues, was particularly important because

It embarked on a conscious and, for its time, remarkably systematic endeavor to develop in the young new and better impulses, to implant inclinations in consonance with the refo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Literacy Drives in Preindustrial Germany
• Chapter 3 The Literacy Campaign in Scotland, 1560—1803
• Chapter 4 Literacy Campaigns in Sweden
• Chapter 5 The Anatomy of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century United States
• Chapter 6 Russian Literacy Campaigns, 1861—1939
• Chapter 7 Literacy Movements in Modern China
• Chapter 8 The 1961 National Cuban Literacy Campaign
• Chapter 9 The Experimental World Literacy Program: A Unique International Effort Revisited
• Chapter 10 Tanzania's Literacy Campaign in Historical-Structural Perspective
• Chapter 11 Adult Literacy for Development in India: An Analysis of Policy and Performance
• Chapter 12 The 1980 Nicaraguan National Literacy Crusade
• Chapter 13 Adult Literacy Policy in Industrialized Countries
• Index