Major campaigns to raise levels of literacy have taken place for
centuries and share many common elements. But despite literary
campaigns spanning over five decades, 860 million adults still lack
minimal ability to read, write, and calculate. Why is literacy of
such great importance and why have so many years of campaigning for
it not been successful in fully overcoming this obstacle? "National
Literacy Campaigns and Movements" explores these questions by
examining campaigns in vastly different societies from a historical
and comparative perspective.
The volume focuses on literacy movements from the past,
including those of Reformation Germany, early modern Sweden and
Scotland, nineteenth-century United States, nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union, pre-Revolutionary
and Revolutionary China, and Tanzania, Cuba, Nicaragua, and India.
Contributors analyze literacy goals and outcomes in specific
contexts. The editors distinguish quantitative and qualitative
dimensions of literacy activities, such as the difference between
the spread of literacy and patterns of its use. The common
enterprise of this book is to expand upon the contributors'
previous research to include a comparative dimension.
This book offers the first systematic attempt to examine,
critically and comparatively, the concepts and facts of large-scale
literacy campaigns in more than a dozen societies over nearly
five-hundred years. It offers a valuable historical lesson not only
for historians, but also for educators: that instead of
concentrating only on the recent period, we should use the vast and
complex history of literacy movements to shed understanding on the
present and future of literacy. A major new introduction to this
edition asserts recent literary campaigns and the lessons provided
by their success and failures. It also describes how the focus of
some movements has evolved.
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