Comments on: “Book Is Best Friend”

By: Evil Jimmy

Evil Jimmy — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 02:31:06 +0000

Sure, we do have to start somewhere, but once you get out of the cities, the literacy rate plunges to some pretty spooky levels, but mostly those are for religious and cultural reasons.
The Soviets, believe it or not, actually spent some time and money on trying to bring up the literacy levels in that country, and didn’t get all that far.
At the tribal level, it seems to be a culture that does not yet seriously value an education for the common Afghani.
That is one of the reasons Koran memorization is so popular in that part of the world.
To me, it appears that this was a program that was dreamed up by some people that never set foot inside that country or if they did, were so idealistic that they couldn’t or wouldn’t see some deeper problems at hand and just wasted $180,000 on a cargo cult.
This (I think) is trying to attack the literacy issue at a point five steps removed from some of the real core reasons.
Also I would wager that any books deemed not compatible with Islam by the local Islamic council don’t exactly make it to the shelves in the first place.
I’ll have to ask the author(s) of that program how they dealt with that issue.
In closing, I don’t see this as anything leading to a more literate Afghanistan without a basic education system to fuel it.

By: Jarmouly

Jarmouly — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 23:07:23 +0000

Yes, Evil Jimmy, but if you want to increase literacy, you have to start somewhere. Just because women in Afghanistan have been denied educations in the past doesn’t mean we should “give up on them” and condemn them to illiteracy forever. Building schools is one step, and that is being done. But most homes in Afghanistan have no books at all, so the next step may very well be to make libraries available to people. It’s a long road, to educate an entire country, but that doesn’t mean every step along that road is worthless.

By: Evil Jimmy

Evil Jimmy — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 22:44:48 +0000

This has to be the dumbest idea I have heard in a while.
I guess it never occurred to anybody at those NGOs to actually LOOK UP the literacy rate in Afghanistan.
It gets as low as one in a thousand for females in some of the more rural provinces.

http://countrystudies.us/afghanistan/72.htm