Reading Globally

This story originally appeared in The Huffington Post.

Understanding the written word opens up windows to the world. It allows a person to communicate with others not in immediate proximity, to engage with thoughts from fellow humans far and away, and with people who lived in the past. It allows access to symbolic representations of the world, to explanations, interpretations of events, enabling in this way understanding. Reading allows also engaging with multiple, even conflicting, interpretations of the facts, and therefore with complexity and nuance. Access to the written code is, in a nutshell, the foundation of logical thinking and understanding, a powerful tool to interpret and transform the world.

On September 8th we celebrate International Literacy Day, as a result of an 1965 initiative of the United Nations Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) organization, designed to highlight how crucial literacy was to people and their communities, and to focus attention on expanding the opportunities for all people to learn to read. UNESCO played a very important global role in expanding literacy, and it did so as a result of internal struggles, early in the life of the organization, to define its mission. A key figure in the focus on literacy was Jaime Torres Bodet, UNESCO's director general from 1948 to 1952 and former Secretary of Education of Mexico, who saw the mission of the organization as advancing fundamental literacy, providing the vast majority of the world's children the opportunity to be schooled and to gain access to the written word...

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