Clevon Raphael

Q: Mrs Lu­cie-Smith, how big a prob­lem is adult lit­er­a­cy in Trinidad and To­ba­go?

A: (At her Cir­cu­lar Road, Bel­mont, of­fice Tues­day af­ter­noon) It is an is­sue that we don't re­al­ly recog­nise usu­al­ly, and now it is be­ing termed a prob­lem which makes it feel as if it was nev­er a prob­lem be­fore. What is mak­ing it an is­sue-I call it an is­sue not a prob­lem-is that the world has changed and now there is the need to read and write in or­der to func­tion in every­day life. We did our first na­tion­al lit­er­a­cy sur­vey in 1994-95 when we found about a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion had that is­sue to deal with.

Has any up­date been done on that sur­vey?

No. But there is an in­ter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion hap­pen­ing now with­in Cari­com which is look­ing at a new lit­er­a­cy tool called Lamp–Lit­er­a­cy As­sess­ment Mon­i­tor­ing Pro­gramme, and the dis­cus­sion is aimed at us­ing Lamp in this re­gion to find out what the re­al sta­tis­tics are.

What oth­er crit­i­cal stats did you un­earth in 1994?

We found out that one in every four per­sons-22-23 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion-had such min­i­mal read­ing and writ­ing abil­i­ty that they would not be able to do their gro­ceries, and they would not be able to full out a form past their name and ad­dress.

Doesn't that fly in the face of our re­peat­ed boast, at least by of­fi­cial­dom, that we were a very lit­er­ate so­ci­ety top­ping the 90 some­thing per cent mark?

Def­i­nite­ly and that is why at the time when we put out the sta­tis­tics they were pret­ty much not ac­cept­ed and we were re­mind­ed that 90-95-98 per cent of the peo­ple were lit­er­ate. But we have to look at where those fig­ures came from.

Where did they come from?

They came from the schools where it was said we had places for 95 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion, so there­fore 95 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion were lit­er­ate. (Cyn­i­cal grin) Now we know that not on­ly could you go to pri­ma­ry school but all the way up to sec­ondary school and still not be lit­er­ate.

This says some­thing not on­ly of the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem but it al­so says some­thing about a per­son, which is that not every­one comes to school with the same set of tools. What we have is an ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem that is very much de­signed for those who are good at lan­guage. We have an es­ti­mat­ed 10-20 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion who are dyslec­tic; who would have prob­lems with read­ing and writ­ing.

Mrs Lu­cie-Smith, this lit­er­a­cy prob­lem...sor­ry, is­sue, is it con­cen­trat­ed in any par­tic­u­lar eth­nic group or is it across the board?

It doesn't have any­thing to do with that.

What about so­cio-eco­nom­ic?

It is across so­cio-eco­nom­ic lev­els but what you will find is if you have the means to send your child for spe­cialised lessons if your child is dyslec­tic, then you can get over that with spe­cialised teach­ing. If you don't have the means to ac­cess spe­cialised teach­ing and you are de­pen­dent on the school sys­tem very of­ten your child would go through the en­tire sys­tem with­out it be­ing picked up, be­cause there is noth­ing in the school sys­tem to deal with it. You are ef­fec­tive­ly say­ing the school sys­tem does not cater for every child? It doesn't, in the sense that those who come in and whose brains are not wired for read­ing and writ­ing they are go­ing to fall be­hind and that falling be­hind isn't ever go­ing to be ad­dressed. What you re­al­ly need is a spe­cialised read­ing teacher in every school and it makes no sense go­ing through the sys­tem and not learn­ing how to read and write. We can­not over em­pha­sise how im­por­tant these skills are.

What age group do your class­es cater to?

Six­teen and up­ward...we have peo­ple in their eight­ies cel­e­brat­ing their birth­days in our class­rooms (a smile of sat­is­fac­tion).

Who can­not read or write?

Read­ing and writ­ing is all about lev­els and this is where sta­tis­tics can be de­cep­tive. If you look at how many peo­ple in Trinidad can­not read or write AT ALL; they can­not look at a let­ter in the al­pha­bet and recog­nise it, they can­not recog­nise the word two. Our sur­vey found it at eight per­cent, most of them are in the old­er gen­er­a­tion who nev­er went to school and would be re­sid­ing in the rur­al ar­eas.

Mrs Lu­cie-Smith, have you came across in­stances where some­body, let's say over 60 years old, would feel em­bar­rassed to join your class­es?

(Ges­tic­u­lat­ing with hands out­stretched) You hit the nail on the hea------d there, Clevon. What you would find is that lit­er­a­cy is cloud­ed with the whole is­sue of shame. If you are an adult and you can­not read you want to keep that hid­den; you don't want it to be known. So that you would have peo­ple walk­ing around with a pen in their shirt pock­et like you are do­ing Clevon, to give the im­pres­sion that they can use it, right? Or al­ways buy­ing a news­pa­per (laughs), walk­ing with it...the on­ly thing is they can­not read, right? You have a lot of cov­er­ing strate­gies they go at, right? So what we have to work on is chang­ing the per­cep­tion that if you are an adult who can­not read it means you are stu­pid, which is def­i­nite­ly not the case. And that shame fac­tor is a stronger fac­tor for men than women who per­haps find it eas­i­er to say, "Oh gosh, I can­not do this well, give me some help." Al­though they have been com­ing it is not easy for men to ask for help.

False pride?

Well (shrug­ging her shoul­ders), you know, ma­cho im­age...a male thing which per­haps says, "I am man and I sup­pose to do things for my­self." But re­cent­ly we have seen more men com­ing in and I don't know if this was caused by a re­cent tele­vi­sion pro­mo­tion we un­der­took.

Does AL­TA have prob­lems re­cruit­ing tu­tors?

All our tu­tors are vol­un­tary and we al­ways have dif­fi­cul­ty in get­ting tu­tors for cer­tain ar­eas, San­gre Grande be­ing num­ber one. We could take 100 stu­dents in that area but we don't have tu­tors. Siparia, Princes Town and Ma­yaro are dif­fi­cult ar­eas, too. One of the fac­tors in this sit­u­a­tion is that tu­tors do not al­ways work in the ar­eas where they live and class­es take place in the evening, so you could imag­ine some­body work­ing in Port-of-Spain leav­ing af­ter 4 pm to get home in time to teach a class in San­gre Grande....im­pos­si­ble.

I gath­er you are hav­ing a 20th an­niver­sary pro­gramme?

Yes, it starts this week­end with the show­ing of a movie pro­duced by the BBC and the Na­tion­al Ge­o­graph­ic So­ci­ety called the "First Grad­er," which is about an 84-year-old ex-Mau Mau fight­er in Kenya, who took up in 2003, an of­fer by that coun­try's gov­ern­ment of free pri­ma­ry school­ing to any­one who want­ed it. It will be first shown on­ly to our stu­dents and tu­tors but we would look in­to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of show­ing it to the wider com­mu­ni­ty at a lat­er date. We are hop­ing to pub­lish a mag­a­zine and at our an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing in Oc­to­ber, we would be ho­n­our­ing sev­er­al tu­tors who have ren­dered yeo­man's ser­vice over the years. And there would al­so be an im­pact study of our ac­tiv­i­ties over the last ten years.

I take it that you do re­ceive some kind of fund­ing from the State?

(Voice drops) No.

So how do you car­ry this bur­den, and have you ever asked for fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance from the State?

We have in the past looked at part­ner­ing with the Gov­ern­ment but you know State fund­ing is al­ways a dou­ble edge sword and you don't want to get de­pen­dent on them. We get fund­ing from some very ap­pre­cia­tive firms in the pri­vate sec­tor and in­di­vid­u­als.

You are not starved for funds, then?

We are not re­al­ly, but we are con­stant­ly ask­ing 'round for fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance to keep us go­ing and so far we have been do­ing a sat­is­fac­to­ry job in that con­text.

Why did you say that State fund­ing could be a two edge sword?

We are an NGO and I know of one par­tic­u­lar such group who was re­ceiv­ing State sup­port and de­mands were made that they do things in a cer­tain way or the fund­ing would be pulled. So you don't want to be put in that sit­u­a­tion.

You think they might seek to politi­cise your work at AL­TA?

Quite pos­si­ble, and I am nev­er go­ing to have AL­TA out there to sup­port any po­lit­i­cal par­ty. You al­ways feel that if you get some­thing you might be asked to...

What, you don't trust the politi­cians?

(A sharp re­tort) Does any­body in this coun­try? (loud laugh­ter). We have tried to re­main po­lit­i­cal­ly neu­tral be­cause adult lit­er­a­cy is a very sen­si­tive top­ic and gov­ern­ments do not like it when we say the na­tion is not lit­er­ate. So we gen­er­al­ly have not been blessed with Gov­ern­ment favour over the years. We have sur­vived this fight with gov­ern­ments who wish that AL­TA would just fade away. In fact Gov­ern­ment pro­grammes come and go but AL­TA stays, and what I would like to see is a gen­uine part­ner­ship with the State.

You pre­fer that at­tempts to get at dyslex­ic chil­dren should start from Form One. With that in mind did the de­c­la­ra­tion of uni­ver­sal free sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion 12 years ago con­tribute to this is­sue?

I think it con­tributed be­cause if you didn't get a place in sec­ondary school, a per­cent­age of those chil­dren would be placed in the post pri­ma­ry class at that time where there was a cur­ricu­lum that stu­dents could cope with and you could still fo­cus on read­ing, writ­ing and maths. Now you are putting stu­dents you know can­not read in­to sec­ondary school. In 2000 we were ap­proached by the task force charged with mak­ing that tran­si­tion and we pro­posed do­ing a pro­gramme dur­ing the East­er and Au­gust va­ca­tion to try to min­imise the prob­lems go­ing in­to sec­ondary school. But that was not done and there wasn't a com­pre­hen­sive plan for ad­min­is­ter­ing the new dis­pen­sa­tion.

Fi­nal­ly Mrs Lu­cie-Smith, from where you sit do you see any ease up in this is­sue any time soon or would it get worse?

(A heavy sigh) Clevon, it will get worse be­fore it gets bet­ter. We are liv­ing in an age where com­mu­ni­ca­tion is in the writ­ten word. Be­fore that com­mu­ni­ca­tion was oral; you want­ed a job you would go and talk to some­body about that. Now you have forms to fill out be­fore you could even talk to some­body. The cell phone is text, the com­put­er every­thing on the net has to be read. So put your­self in the po­si­tion of the per­son who can­not read. How can they take part in the life that every­body else is in­volved in? The sad part is that the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem is not cater­ing to these peo­ple.