media-12

Transcriber:	Jing Chen (nety75@hotmail.com)
Brief Bio:	I have a B.A. in English Education, and an M.S. in Communication Studies at Inidana State University.  I studied for a year at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL for my PH.D program.  Right now, I am living at Taipei with my husband and his family.  Because I don't have work permit, I'd like to devote more of my time doing volunteering work.  Transcribing the video excerpts is fun, and I also intends to move into translation part.
Date finished:	April 29, 2005
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            I am Noland Bowie. I am a senior seller and adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Howard University.  This is my concise, short, summary-version of a literacy policy which is the fastest information policy per se. 

            What is literacy?  Literacy is a lot more than the ability to read and write and do a couple of computation skills.  And even with these basic skills, plus a half the adult population of the United States have insufficient skills and that is one and two bottom two ranks of literacy.  That is becoming dysfunctional the deeper we go information, age and truth, knowledge and economy which requires new skills, higher skills, and it requires lifelong learning, and it requires the ability to learn how to learn. 

            What we need, oh, let me tell … There’s no theme of literacy.  I don’t feel the term literacy is often written down sometimes just as...  But literacy itself sometimes encompasses not only alphabetic-numeric literacy, our text and prose, but also what is increasingly called information literacy, or networked literacy, or technology literacy, or civic or political literacy. Literacy is an enabling tool.  Literacy is itself a technology.  It changes as fast as technology and communications change.  Literacy is a basic skill which we need to communicate.  I would add that not only does it provide one with the means of critical thinking, but also critical acting.  And the reason that literacy is required of everyone is because we don’t have to be tone- , and we get most of our information by curiously from the outside. Literacy is sort of a skill of-  It’s a pool of technology skills. Just when we want information we can go and we can pull it out of the resource as supposed to a letric literacy skill of being a good listener or viewer and having information pushed at us.  Like, say, a television station which pushes up information through signals, and the internet just increasingly pushing information following the television model.  When that happens, you ran out to get  propaganda.  What’s the difference between propaganda and another kind of information?  Sometimes not a lot.  But propagandas tend to disclose who the person I s and what their agenda is, or what their motives are and sometimes you might not re-listen to them.  So you sort of endanger yourself.

             Amm, throughout the world, there are literacy and illiteracy, and your substantial problems are…I have a chart here which I will make available to with a listing of nations with the worst literacy record in the world.  At the top of the list is Niger in which seventy-nine percent of the males and ninety-three-point -seven percent of the females, and I assumed the population is valid in term of gender, so eighty-six percent of the adult population is illiterate.  Burkina Faso, 81 percent.  Nepal, 72.5 percent. Mali, 69 percent.  And the list goes on.  The same nations have the shortest life expectancies and birth rates and probably the lowest quality of life in the whole area. 

            Can literacy turn it around?  Not often by itself.  Literacy is an enabling technology.  Literacy is both content and information technology.  We have to guarantee universal access to all types of literacy.

             The term "digital divide" tends to refer to recognition that people are better off if they have access to the internet connectivity, PCs, or internet appliance.  Well, I disagree with that somewhat.  What I think is essential is ready, universal access to, universal…ready access to relevant information.  And what's relevant information depends on individuals’ needs, or societal needs, or group or organizational needs.  What's relevant is also time-sensitive.  And you have  to alsolook at the quality of that information.  Next you need, because information is increasingly available on electronic and digital format.  Ready access to appropriate information technology which may be or may not be the internet, but in many cases it may be a book, a tutor, a pencil and paper, again, what is appropriate for that individual to understand and within a language that a person can understand.  Again the internet right now is mostly English, 80% of the websites.  That may change ten years from now, maybe mostly in Mandarin or some other language we don’t know. 

            Is the problem of illiteracy confined to third world or developing countries?  No.  I have an article here that appeared in the Boston Globe dated Sept.16, 1995 which says almost half of adults in the States don't read well.  They read at the lowest levels, one and two.  A more recent article on the Washington Post from last year said that 65% of the adults in the District of Columbia read as low as one and two, the lowest levels of literacy, which means that they will be dysfunctional in an information-based and knowledge-based economy.  They will lack the skills to be productive, creative, and self-realized, and all that can be. 

            More recent, also last year, the article from the Globe, and I just cut out the statistics, it shows reading gaps.  This is done by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.  It shows the assessment of reading proficiency levels within the fourth grade. 63% of the black school children in fourth grade are not meeting the proficiency levels.  58 % of Hispanic or Latino kids, 57% of American Indians or Native Americans are also reading below level.  Whereas 27% of the whites are reading below level, and  22% of Asian-Pacific Islanders are reading at that low level.  You may ask why the Asian-Pacific kids read at better reading skills.  They tend to be bilingual, bicultural than native-born white.  Good question.  I think part of the reason for low blacks-low reading scores among blacks is the residual of a history of being heavily enslaved and having a loss that prohibited the teaching the blacks how to read and write and followed by a long history of inferior schools and Jim Crow segregation.  And also expectation and continued superioty of quality school education. 

            Which comes to another question.  Can we afford to have a large or even small portions of our population of our work force to have inadequate skills to participate the emerging global knowledge-based economy, because less implied by globalization is competition.  Less implied by competition is winners and losers.  The question is who are to win.  If it's us, who is us?  Is it all of us?  Or should the beneficiaries of our public policy just be the wealthy, those who already have advantages and privileges?  Or multi-national corporations, corporations that are not necessarily citizens.  And, or should we look at it more broadly and say well that what makes America.  America would make our society, and our society is of our people. They are the citizens.  They are the consumers.  And they are the work force.  So, how should we go about invest in them, in terms of ensuring their literacy skills.  Literacy skills never stop.  They're always advancing and always changing.  So how do we go about providing lifelong learning opportunity to the entire population.  I would suggest a radical legislation based on our own history after the Soviet Union successfully launched Spotneck, congress during the Eisenhower’s administration passed the National Defense Education Act.  And Eisenhower’s administration also created several high-way systems based on national defense rationale.  And so, the nature of the world, post-cold-war world, is increasingly one about competition for markets and domination for markets.  And if that’s true, to the extent that is true, and again, what’s been sold in the markets, in many cases, are information products, information services.  How do we enable our population to acquire those skills and continue to develop them?  I would suggest something like a national defense, education, communications and information act, so the government provides means that we can all be all that we can be.  Right now, we can no longer afford to incarcerate, say, more than two million people, and not only taking them out of the work force, but also keeping them away from relevant information, knowledge and literacy.  The 1992 MR study on literacy in the United States showed that in particular, illiteracy is associated with low incomes, with poverty, with welfare, and with incarceration.  So there may be an access or link between them. If people have more adequate literacy earlier on, perhaps they'll be more successful.  Another project or program I think we ought to take a hard look at is, uh, universal access to pre-school.  By the time they are in fourth grade, it may be too late.  Everybody should have information advantages, if in fact we are gonna be competitive in an information age. 

            Where do we go from here?  How do we mobilize, and how do we get others to talk about literacy as being important.  Why literacy in the first place?  We make the assumption that we need to work for it.  We also need to become effective citizens and democracy itself needs a literate citizenry in order to keep it in check.  Democracy in final analysis is a system of governance based not on trust, but on distrust.  As such, it requires those who govern-the representatives of the people have to be accountable to the people.  It requires that the citizens are informed, not just informed, but well informed-enough to know whether or not they are being adequately served, because if you read the Bill of Right, for example, or Declaration of Independence, citizens have a duty to put in their new government, if in fact they are not serving, very good people.  So the people have a responsibility to know and know well that they can do that through literacy. 

            And that also explains this new kind of literacy, this new emerging literacy, or what we are recognizing as new literacy—civic literacy, which may also be referred to as political literacy.  The result of a literate population is not only people can read and utilize tools effectively to maneuver their environments, enable them to think and act critically.  Ah, now, I’ll stop here.