Literacy as a Foundation for Improvement

What is Literacy? Some would say it’s the foundation to study and understand a lot of things, the foundation of every human to develop and be able to communicate effectively between people. For many parents, it is needed to help their children in their learning phase. For many children, it’s a basic skill needed to succeed at studying and to navigate their path. What I mean by navigate is as simple as to be able to read books, to know what is happening from news, to be able to read a price tag and medicine instruction. It also means to be able to understand what is stated in a letter, especially if it’s a notification from the government, and eventually for them to enter the working environment which in our globalized world would requires a skilled and educated workforce.

In a long term, lack of literacy could result in low quality of education, stalled economic development and the failure to understanding a global crisis such as climate change or local issues such as the importance to protect marine life for the next generation. On the other hand, literacy not only improve all those things I mentioned, it could also promote the idea of tolerance and how to appreciate differences when the children are supplied with the right information.

But, what is the definition of literacy? Most people would define it as the ability to read and write. This however, could also create a problem since it often brings dichotomy between those who are literate and those who are not, when actually being literate is only the first step from using it from understanding sentences. From UNESCO data from 2018 it shows that 99.7% of the Indonesian population aged between 15-24 years o