EDUCATION: A 56-Year-Old Finally Learned To Write His Name — Because Of A Coronavirus Lockdown
NPR On April 10, Indian authorities housed Bora and dozens of other stranded migrants in a school converted into a relief camp in the town of Tanakpur along the India-Nepal border. India has set up more than 20,000 camps across the country to provide food and shelter to poor people affected by the lockdown.
But at the Tanakpur relief camp, residents get something extra: an opportunity to learn.
It’s one of 10 centers in Uttarakhand’s Champawat district where authorities are running literacy programs for illiterate migrant workers. About 200 inhabitants are learning to read and write for the first time, says Ramesh Chandra Purohit, chief education officer for Champawat district.
“We wanted the laborers to get something out of the lockdown and not just kill time,” says Purohit.
Purohit explains that Champawat sits on the Indo-Nepal border and sees a huge influx of poor, illiterate laborers. Bora was one of them. He came to India nearly two decades ago to find work and usually goes back home twice a year to visit his family. When the relief camp organizers first tried to get him enrolled in the literacy program a few weeks ago, Bora was hesitant.
Shukla says laborers mostly come from states that have very low adult literacy rates. India has more than one-third of the world’s illiterate adults.
“He was embarrassed that he was the oldest of all the students in the class,” says municipal official Prema Thakur who teaches the laborers. Most of the students are in their thirties, says Thakur. “He used to say, ‘what am I going to do learning to read and write at this age?'” says Thakur.
But Thakur and her colleagues motivated him. They brought notebooks and pencils for their students. And after just two days of classes, Bora was able to write his name in Hindi, Thakur says. In fact, he learned faster than many of his younger classmates, including his 30-year-old son, Thakur adds.
“It felt really nice [when I wrote my name],” Bora says. “When I was a kid, we used to live in a hilly area and there was no school nearby.”
Bora says his family was also too poor to send him to school.
ADULT ILLITERACY IN THE UNITED STATES
Literacy Levels of American Adults
We’re often told that such and such a percentage have “basic” literacy, that so and so percent are “proficient,” but we’re rarely given the actual questions, or maybe just one or two.
I went to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy and then to the sample questions from the test. If this doesn’t work try, Sample Items or just go to NAAL/ and mouse around.
Here are seven of the 96 at the site (text altered slightly to fit this web page). I am sending these to amaze you, since the actual questions are rarely publicized. The reason you’ll probably be amazed is that most of us associate, except for short conversations lasting under one minute, almost entirely with those of similar literacy levels.
I’m also estimating what the rest of the world would come out.
World IQ averages about 90, so the 50th percentile for Americans (IQ 100) is the 75th percentile for the world. (I realize these are simplifications, but they’ll do for now.)
BY FRANK FORMAN