Tasmania’s Illiteracy: The Consequences of Illiteracy
Suspend your judgement for just one minute and have a read of this article:
And this kid’s not alone. More than 20 per cent of Burnie’s youth are unemployed, the highest rate in Australia, my mother lived in the area for a brief period and dated a man who’s two sons stories were not too dissimilar to that of the John Smith character in the article’s main story. They live in a state that has the lowest Years 11 and 12 retention rates in the country; where literacy skills are consistently assessed as being below the national average (half the population has been classed as being functionally illiterate, meaning they have insufficient skills to process the information from newspapers or fill out job applications).
Just pause on that for a moment, HALF of Tasmania is classed as functionally ILLITERATE… literacy rates like that should be unheard of in a country that calls itself the “lucky country”, or even calling itself developed, fixing education would go a long way to fixing unemployment. Perhaps the VCE/HSC driven secondary education with a one size fits all approach is not what works best?
As explored in my blog discussions of Network Illiteracy, Traditional Illiteracy is a serious problem, a functional democracy can’t exist within a population that has 50% illiteracy, how are these people to be expected to get informed and vote? How can they be enterprising citizens if they can’t even write a CV or job application? These people are locked out of decision making that affects them, they cannot have effective agency in society. This is not cool.
This weeks symposium posed two interrelated questions, “what is the future of network literacy?” and “what are the consequences of Network Illiteracy” — It’s not a far stretch of the imagination to look at Tasmania’s illiteracy rate and unemployment rate and see some of Elliot and Adrian’s points in the flesh.
