How Literacy Improves Human Rights and Helps Us Survive Pandemics

Written By Ned ZimmermanBence

Children from the United Nations International Nursery School look at a poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (1950) UN Photo

The United Nations has designated three days of observance this month to gather attention around these issues:

Integral to each of these days of observation is literacy:

The ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.- UNESCO

Literacy is no less than the foundational skill through which we understand and synthesize new information to make decisions and create goods and services. It is central to full realization of human rights, the achievement of health, and the ability to understand and prepare for emerging threats such as pandemics.

Literacy as a Human Right

Women in crowded Nigerian classroom, September 3rd 1990

Nigeria: Women crowd into a literacy class, taking the first steps to improving their lives. In 1990, declared the International Literacy Year, surveys showed that over 900 million adults were illiterate, and 125 million children were not enrolled in school.

To understand why literacy is a human right, an extremely abbreviated and superficial history of human rights might help. The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 was the first document in modern times to explicitly define the rights of any human being (well, at least the rights of any property-holding man of European descent):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Despite the paradox enshrined in the document, the Declaration of Independence was a significant document in a long progression of thought about governance that began in classical city-states of the Mediterranean, was renewed by the Magna Carta in medieval England, gained greater prominence in the Enlightenment, and eventually adopted on a global scale by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 (albeit still with a gendered bias):

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Particular to GogyUp's focus on adult education, Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Technical and professional education shall be made generally available ... Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms."

The ability to read, compute, and communicate fluently is clearly a foundational skill for any individual to enjoy their right to education. As the global economy becomes increasingly information-driven, literacy naturally becomes all the more vital to an individual's ability to obtain one's "full development of the human personality" which we at GogyUp interpret to mean "the unconstrained opportunity to acquire the skills necessary to advance in an increasingly technical and dynamic world".

Literacy, whether in one's preferred language or the language of an oppressor, is an awesome skill with the potential for universal literacy to further progress to a global universal society. The ability of any human being to obtain literacy allows literacy to serve as a great equalizer - which is why it eventually became illegal to teach slaves to read in the American South. Literacy eventually became a justification to end American slavery.

Literacy Is Cultural Survival

First Nations elder in traditional clothing with children in European clothes

Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, via EPA, via Shutterstock

As with any universal human right, universal literacy is easy to understand - everyone should have an inalienable right to be able to read - yet at times implemented with methods that counter rather than support universal rights.

Does universal literacy mean the ability to read only in a dominant language? Or in one's preferred or "native" language? History and contemporary policies of governments across the world are unfortunately rife with violations of UNESCO's definition of literacy: the "residential" and "boarding" schools used by United States and Canadian governments that interrupted generational transfer of language, to the present day in which boarding schools, this time in the People's Republic of China, are once again disrupting the transfer of Uighur culture, language, and literacy.

Universal literacy, in its truest sense, is more than reading. Per UNESCO, literacy "is now understood as a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world." For all cultures to survive and for their different perspectives to enrich solutions to our shared and increasingly dire issues, those cultures must maintain and develop fully literate populations. Otherwise, inequalities that spawn, facilitate and perpetuate societal threats will persist.

Universal literacy therefore must equate with universal preservation of culture.

Literacy and Universal Health

Patient receiving vaccination.

Covid-19 vaccination for medical personnel in Banyumas, Indonesia. (Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash)

December 12th, 2021 will mark the 4th year since the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the day as International Universal Health Coverage Day in 2017. For half that time, COVID-19 has exposed the weaknesses and relative strengths of health systems across the world.

A structural fail point in all health systems - "weak" and "strong" - is the endemic health illiteracy on a global scale. According to UNESCO, 775,000,000 adults lack functional literacy. Therefore, even if a magic wand were waved and universal health coverage suddenly became available to everyone around the globe, significant health disparities between and within countries would still exist because of widespread adult illiteracy.

Social determinants of health (SDOH) are environmental conditions in which people live, learn, and work. SDOH create a wide range of health and quality-of-life effects in which literacy is a major factor. A significant body of research documents the correlation between higher levels of literacy and better health outcomes and similar decline in health outcomes in populations with lower levels of literacy..

Thirty years of research has also documented how limited literacy creates several barriers to health including:

Universal health and universal literacy go hand in hand. Without universal literacy, and the ability to learn and apply information with ever greater complexity, populations are robbed of the full potential that universal health could provide.

Literacy and Epidemic Preparedness

Epidemic preparedness expands the scope of universal health's dependency on literacy to encompass not only human health but also animal and plant health. In particular, literacy is the foundational skill for scientific literacy and the ability to understand and process information that connects probable causes to probable solutions, e.g., why deforestation and warming climates will facilitate a greater number of viruses, including coronaviruses, to jump from animals to humans.

Key to successful resolution of COVID-19, the next pandemic, and the pandemic after that one is access to accurate and reliable, freely available information and, tied to universal health coverage and human rights, access to necessary health care and government restrictions that are focused on containing the virus rather than the populace.

GogyUp's Role

Knowledge is central to each individual's ability to exercise their rights.

Literacy clearly plays an outsized role in learning and knowledge creation.

However, the scale of adult illiteracy is vast: UNESCO estimates that there are 775,000,000 adults without functional literacy. In the United States alone, one in six adults are severely limited in their literacy capability.

To help bridge the number of adults who need to acquire literacy (at least in English) and the availability of quality instruction, the GogyUp Reader and Snap Reader Android and iOS applications combine in-the-moment reading assistance for any document with personalized, sequenced instruction in foundational literacy skills that adult can learn over time.

The skills that are available now are:

  • Phonemic awareness - the ability to identify which of the 43 English phonemes (sounds) are in an individual spoken word.

  • Phonics - how the English alphabet's 26 letters and hundreds of letter combinations are encoded and decoded to represent those 43 sounds.

It is our vision to expand the opportunities for adults to understand information in the moment and develop the capacity to fluently read, over time. Co-developed with formerly incarcerated adults and immigrants, we were able to identify what people needed immediately and what approaches would be supportive for building literacy skills over time. Furthermore, through GogyUp's no-fail comprehension questions and word-by-word translation, employers now have new windows into their employees’ understanding.

As a Minnesota state-approved distance learning platform, GogyUp was able to provide our phenomenal partners at CLUES with a turnkey system to continue their literacy and GED classes when they found themselves having to make the leap to distance learning from face-to-face. Thanks to an SBIR grant with the USDA's National Institute for Food and Agriculture, we are piloting GogyUp with rural employers to measure its impact on rural workforce development - and the results are positive.

This winter, we will launch a study with our partners at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, School of Medicine and the Community-University Health Care Clinic. This National Institute of Nursing Research SBIR Phase I grant will investigate how in-the-moment support for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patient information via our assistive-reading technology impacts patient capacity to manage their disease. During this random controlled trial, the treatment group of patients will have access to the same patient education materials normally available but also are incorporated into the GogyUp Reader.

A one-pager describing the study is available here.

We look forward to another year of facilitating understanding in inaccessible texts and expanding the opportunities for adults to improve their literacy skills, anywhere and at any time.

In the meantime, please join us in celebrating these three days of observance:

If you have a comment, question or correction about anything in this article or GogyUp in particular, please share with us here: comment@gogyup.com

Ned ZimmermanBence
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