Literally illiterate

Lately, I’ve been seeing disturbing signs everywhere. I wonder, are these signs literally the signs of our times? The above quotations are actual official signs and advertisements, displayed by government offices, commercial enterprises and private individuals. The thing is, these signs are neither standard English nor Trini dialect.

In reality, they represent a mishmash of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and sentences that just don’t make any sense. Our sense of literacy wasn’t always so diabolical, so when did it become acceptable to mis-educate ourselves in this way? At a basic level, literacy is “the ability to read and write”. However as a developing nation, our concept of literacy should go much deeper to incorporate critical thinking, the ability to discuss global affairs, having an opinion and even challenging the opinions of others.

To my disappointment, I’ve discovered that the Adult Literacy Tutors Association (ALTA) has about 50 centres across our country, with a steady stream of people who participate in their free classes. I read that in 2010 ALTA started its term with some 2,000 students. Of course, while I am sure that ALTA does exceptional work, ideally we would prefer that their services were not in such demand.

Statistically, our general literacy indicators appear to be very good; based on the data we have a high level of literacy in TT. I imagine this means that according to the basic definition of literacy, a vast number of our population can in fact read and write. But then, we listen to the poor English of some parliamentarians and radio announcers, and read the convoluted articles in our print media and we begin to question the numbers.

We need to examine how we got here as a nation, and more importantly, why it should matter.

Somewhere along our development path, video, online and mobile sources took precedence as repositories of information and entertainment. Less emphasis was placed on reading for pleasure, so the act of picking up a book became primarily associated with some form of study. A small investigation within my own circle of family and friends supports this.

For instance, my sons are considered strange because they read.

However, interestingly, when they encouraged one of their peers to read a book, he admitted that he enjoyed the experience. This says to me that too many young people have been deprived of the joy of discovering different worlds through books, and not enough parents share in the simple bonding act of reading for their children.

It is time to establish a closer alliance between our schools and the Schools Libraries Division of our National Library. If it is not done already, library cards need to be provided to all primary-level children and time must be allocated for them to experience the wonderment of borrowing a book.

Storytelling from the pre-school stage must become a regular feature, and I don’t mean with foreign material, but through our wealth of local writers who have wonderfully captured our reality with their riveting prose and poetry.

A great deal of us may be able to read and write, but the problem is the absence of a deeper level of literacy. On reflection, I do think those signs that haunt me are the signs of our times. They are pointing to where we are now, but perhaps they are also telling us that it is time to change direction.

D a r a Healy is a perform a n c e artist and founder of the NGO, the Indigenous Creative Arts Network – ICANn