SOUTHERN AFRICA: Literacy conference focuses on critical thinking

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

MBABANE, 25 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - Academics attending the 4th Pan-African 'Reading for All' Conference in Swaziland this week say greater effort is needed to improve critical thinking among students across the continent.

The theme of the biannual gathering is 'Literacy for Sustainable Development', and is sponsored by the International Reading Association (IRA).

"We want to debunk the myth that that literacy is an aside to development - it is the foundation of development, particularly in the information age," C.E. Onukaogu, president of the International Development in Africa Committee, told IRIN.

He pointed out that while efforts to get more kids to read and write were commendable, much more was needed to develop critical thinking.

"Until recently, it was not useful to African leaders to have their people becoming critical, creative thinkers: such thinking leads to a change of the status quo - it wasn't in the interest of leaders to have their subjects thinking. They told their people what to think," said Onukaogu.

"Literacy means knowing how to read and write, but it [also] means training your mind ... to be able to go beyond what you are reading, to analyse and come up with new concepts," commented Richard Chediel, a teacher training coordinator from Botswana.

Although African governments were spending around 26 percent or more of their annual budgets on education, inadequate resources were still hampering efforts to achieve universal literacy.

A paucity of school and public libraries, and the prohibitive cost of books are also thwarting attempts to promote literacy in Africa. "You can't teach literacy without the tools," Onukaogu noted.

Solutions already appearing in pilot programmes throughout southern Africa include mobile libraries; books written by students, offering stories relevant to their contemporaries; and school feeding schemes to nourish students and make them more alert in classrooms.

"We are sharing these 'best practices' and finding the ones that can apply uniformly throughout Africa, but there is one thing promoters of literacy in Africa agree upon: literacy is the right of every African citizen," said Spangle Mmema, a primary school teacher in Swazi capital, Mbabane.

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