Research & Application on "How Illiterate People Learn"

Three most basic survival needs: water, food, and shelter, which most of us take for granted, are a daily struggle for 1.1 billion people around the world (those who live on less than $1/day estimated in 2001 by the World Bank); 17,000 children die of hunger every day (same source). What can we do about it? Examples of efforts trying to address this issue include the "food banks" concept and other charity activities. Although they provide relief to the basic-needs crises, the relief tends to be temporary, and its reach has been limited.

"Give a man a fish; you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; you feed him for a lifetime." If we read this old adage in the context of poverty, we can relate to the role of "education" in pulling people out of poverty. But the word "education" is broad and disguises its complexity. The policy goal here is how to teach an illerate person to earn a decent living. To do that we need to understand how an illiterate person learns.

I came across an interesting research article, by Fanta-Vagenshtein (PhD) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, on "How Illiterate People Learn". What's interesting about this article is that we need to understand how adult illiterate people learn, we can then design effective educational policy and/or institutions to teach them "how to fish". Even if we manage to do just that, the challenge remains where to "fish", and whether or not there is enough "fish" for everybody. That is why vocational programs alone appear to be ineffective, unless there is a direct and reliable connection between training and jobs.