1946Creation of the Fundamental Education Committee whose report, Fundamental Education: Common Ground for All Peoples, was published the following year
1947
Regional conferences on fundamental education at Nankin (China) and Mexico City (just before the Second Session of the General Conference of UNESCO)
1948
Formulation of an action programme for fundamental education
1949
In fifty years, literacy education has undergone a rapid expansion which has co-incided with demographic growth rates without, however, being able to catch up with them. For example, in 1950 two out of three males and one out of four females were literate and in 1995 the rate was eight men and seven women out of ten. Nevertheless, even if the estimated literate population has increased from 700 million in 1950 to 3 billion today, there remain 1 billion adolescents and adults worldwide who cannot read and write. Graphs presented in the section ‘Education and Society’ highlight the considerable efforts of Member States in this domain and the progress they have made. The same statistical data, whilst not repeated here, are nevertheless useful as a backdrop in this respect, bearing in mind the evolution since 1950 of the conventions, standards and procedures that have enabled their collection.
A CONTINUOUS EFFORT TO SENSITIZE
AND MOBILIZE PUBLIC OPINION AND GOVERNMENTS
The problem of illiteracy has been of concern to UNESCO since its creation and, even if it was evident that the long-term solution was the rapid extension of primary education, the Secretariat could not simply disregard the adult population - the ‘prisoners of ignorance’. The lack of resources is the main obstacle to the eradication of adult illiteracy: an adult needs about two years and 500 hours of training to learn how to read and write, and drop-out is frequent. Afterwards, once literacy has been achieved, an adult needs an environment which is favourable to maintaining what has been learned. If for several decades the international community has advocated the eradication of illiteracy, for many countries it has been difficult to translate general goodwill into political will and to release the necessary credits. The Organization’s action, never interrupted, has consisted of promoting and supporting national efforts in a variety of ways.
Projects, often on a small-scale, have been carried out within the framework of the fundamental education programme approved by the First Session of UNESCO’s General Conference. Then, with the accession to independence of many countries and in the context of the first development decade, the World Conference of Ministers of Education on the Eradication of Illiteracy (Tehran, 1965) marked the passage from a strategy involving large-scale campaigns for universal literacy to that of selected functional literacy projects directly linked to economic and social development, with the Experimental World Literacy Programme (EWLP) (1967-1973). During the 1970s and 1980s, the Organization continued to support literacy activities in its Member States through its regional programmes. The 1990 Jomtien Conference gave fresh momentum to the commitment of the international community to achieve the objective of basic education for all as set out in UNESCO’s Medium-Term Strategy for 1996-2001, and in which literacy education for young people and adults, and the generalization of primary education are of prime importance.
