W

hen it comes to literacy, there seems to be nothing that we, as a nation, can be proud of.

Despite 93 percent of its population claiming to be able to read and write, this nation has never made it out of the bottom five of the world’s literacy surveys.

Recent surveys include the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test, assessing fourth graders’ achievement in reading literacy, ranking Indonesia at 45th place out of the 48 participating countries, while the 2012 Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) survey evaluating the literacy skills of 15-year-old students, placed the nation at 64th place out of 65 countries in students’ reading scores.

The latest survey published by Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) lists Indonesia as the second-least literate country out of the 61 countries profiled. Referring to its criteria, the survey has marked Indonesia as a country that has published only a few printed and online newspapers per capita (ranked 55th), with a limited
number of libraries per capita (listed as number 36.5) and limited household access to online information, indicated by the ratio of households with computers (second to last place).

Even though this nation ranks fairly in regard to the years of minimum compulsory education and the proportion of the government’s expenditure of the gross domestic product (GDP) (54th on the list), these efforts cannot boost our students’ performances in PIRLS and PISA surveys.

Meanwhile, the Nordic countries (Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden) dominated the top five spots in the ranking due to their well-established reading habits.

The good news is that our adult literacy rate is deemed to be well performing. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) claimed that in 2011, about 93 percent of Indonesian adults (the population older than 15 years old) could read or write, far outreaching the global average of 84 percent.

The literacy rate in Indonesia even outnumbers that of India (69 percent) and of Pakistan (55 percent). When the ability to read or write cannot nurture the literate behavior, what seems to be the problem?
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Being literate in the information era is entitled with the ability to make meaning of information.

We clearly need to expand our understanding toward literacy. More than three decades ago, Harvey Graff (1979) suggested the idea of the “literacy myth”, that the ability to read or write does not automatically translate to economic and social mobility.

Further, his research found that there was no correlation between the years of formal schooling and social success.

If literacy is defined as the mere ability to decode written texts and practice writing mechanically – the way it is enacted in conventional methods of teaching in most public schools nowadays – then, these literacy skills contribute very little to social transformation and societal empowerment.

In this modern world, literacy is defined as a set of skills that enable one to fully function in all areas of social, economic and political life. Paulo Freire (1972) has long advocated literacy for liberating humanities.

Through “reading the words and the world”, he proposes that literacy should allow people to become an active participant in learning.

When reading, students are not passive recipients of knowledge. In nurturing students’ active participations, school literacy should enable them to reflect critically upon their readings and make use of them to transform their lives. This requires school curriculum to redefine and reform the ways reading is taught in classrooms.

Literacy based curriculum needs to engage more literature and children’s storybooks in promoting reading enjoyment, and involve more discussion to nourish dialogue about readings.

In the information and communication technology (ICT) era, literacy learning should transform reading from decoding written texts into a stage that enables students to navigate texts with multiple formats, level of expressions and rhetorical styles.

This is important because students are now living in the era of information abundance.

Being literate in the information era is entitled with the ability to make meaning of information and to use it in making decisions and further, to participate in social and economic actions. These competences constitute the basis for the literacy behaviors in modern life.

As CCSU points out, “societies that do not practice literate behavior are often squalid, undernourished in mind and body, repressive of human rights and dignity, brutal and harsh”.

This framework explains why the supporting sources — newspapers, libraries, computers, and years of compulsory schooling — are valued as indicators for developing a nation’s literate behavior. For example, when finding a solution to a problem, a literate person would develop knowledge based on his or her search of written sources made available by newspapers, libraries and the internet, rather than oral sources.

Information literacy skill was declared by UNESCO in Prague in 2003. However, its enactment in Indonesian classrooms is outweighed by efforts to raise students’ standardized scores.

This nation may have paid too much attention to students’ success on the national exam. In fact, it is not students’ performance on this standardized test that prepares them to be inquisitive, lifelong learners.

We need to nurture students’ behavior in relation to literacy by developing students’ agency over written sources. This can be carried out by nurturing their passion for reading and promoting reflective and critical thoughts about reading material.
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The writer is the head of the Litara Foundation and a member of the School Literacy Movement.