Postliteracy in the Age of Democracy

This important book is critical reading for anyone confronting the problem of how to improve the retention of literacy skills among newly literate populations. The author sets out comparing programs and methods in China and Tanzania in order to answer some of the most difficult and important questions facing educators today. Why is it we are experiencing difficulty teaching children the skills needed to understand and produce written work? Why do individuals sometimes lose these skills after they have acquired them? Why has such an important area of education become so problematic? This volume seeks in its analysis to go beyond the questions of assessment and statistical measures of national literacy rates. Tracing the progress made by newly literate individuals emerging from strictly traditional oral cultures, this work examines the complex combinations of oral and literate communication and exchange, the struggle to overcome the odds of losing the gained literacy skills because of the death of reading material, poverty, and competing social, economic, political and cultural agendas.