The scale and importance of the problem of illiteracy in India and the rest of the world are well known. In January 1998 I had the luck to speak (in Hindi) with a group of Hindu pilgrims on the train between Madras and Vellore, in Tamil Nadu. They described the school in their village as a shack with a sign saying 'School', but no chalk, no chalkboard, and most of all, no teacher. Their poignant comment was, ``What are we supposed to do, go sit there?'' With hundreds of millions of citizens who cannot read, India lacks an effective system of universal public education. Illiteracy rates are dramatically higher among rural populations than urban ones, and also much higher among women than men.
So far, attempts to address illiteracy on India's scale have been palliative and symbolic - in short, ineffective. Despite the educational orientation of Indian society, most poor Indians cannot pay for education for themselves or their children. The government's ability to provide public education is quite limited. And success for charitable organizations may be measured in terms of one or a few schools, some temporary programs for Tamil-origin students from abroad to teach in villages, or other programs which are several orders of magnitude smaller than the actual problem. Thus self-help, government sponsored schools, and charitable projects are all fundamentally ineffective in spreading literacy. These normal methods have been applied for decades but success can only be declared if the real size of the problem is ignored.
However, we here propose a new, scaleable method of addressing the problem.
Consider the problem of learning to read and write. This is actually many problems, including the knowledge of the sound-symbol correspondences of a script, the skill of drawing its letters, and the alphabetic principle itself, whereby sequences of concatenated or combined letters are interpreted as sound sequences, words, and sentences.
The primary obstacle preventing an illiterate person from acquiring basic literacy is the sound-symbol correspondence, which is arbitrary and conventional, in the sense that from the mere shape of the symbol one cannot infer the identity of the associated sound, until one has memorized this arbitrary set of correspondences. Because it is arbitrary and conventional, it is impossible to learn it without access to those sound-symbol conventions themselves. The other obstacles are clearly less important: a smart and motivated person given just the barest of hints should be able to teach himself or herself both to manipulate a pencil and also to make the analogy between sequencing among letters and sequencing among sounds, and thereby to be able to sound out sequences of letters and thus to form and identify words. But without knowing what sound is associated with what symbol, there is no hope whatsoever that one can acquire the ability to read or write in a given language.
The concept proposed here addresses the fundamental problem of the sound-symbol correspondence, in a way which is amenable to widespread delivery to individuals for very little per-person cost. While it leaves the other obstacles largely to the wits of the student, the fact is that the knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences is the only insurmountable obstacle restricting literacy to those who can afford a teacher. The other issues can be figured out by a significant percentage of intelligent, motivated students, with little or no intervention, and indeed it can then be further spread within illiterate groups by those members who have figured it out. Therefore, if we can indeed make accessible that crucial information - the correspondences between the sounds in a person's language and the letters in the script for that language - then we will have made it possible for them to learn to read without a teacher. We may not have made it easy, certainly, but at least we have made it possible for persistence and intelligence to overcome otherwise quite unassailable structural impediments.
The intent for Phase I of this project is to advance this concept to the stage where large scale deployment may be justified. We intend to refine its implementation beyond its present alpha-level state, to test it in the field in Tamil Nadu, to improve the graphics and supporting elements on the page as well as the delivery protocol (which answers the question, Exactly what do you say when you only have a few seconds with each recipient?). We will test various methodologies for low cost yet effective delivery. We will provide estimates of per person cost when scaled up. Through pre-delivery tests and later followup tests, we will provide quantitative estimates of the effectiveness of the final methods in several random-location deployments.
In the next phase of the project, if success is attained in the pilot study, we hope to deploy the instrument throughout Tamil Nadu (paying special attention to the problems of completeness of coverage of the target population, particularly of women, of potential fraud by the delivery staff, and other management issues). After that, we intend to address additional languages with similar projects, while simultaneously generating publicity to linguists and educators throughout the world who will be able to participate in applying these methods to their respective languages.