TED Conversations  Richard Stack  This conversation is closed.
Start a new conversation or join one »  Improving female
literacy in the maternal language as a significant contribution
to helping women to control their fertility  Literacy is the
ability to decode and encode the language you already know. In
the "advanced" world it is taken for granted. In the "Third
World" it is not; most established institutions insisting on
teaching the lingua franca, or the colonial language, or
English, rather than the languages people actually speak..  This
practice produces an inevitably secondrate literacy, (and thus
an underclass,) for all but the most gifted and wealthy, for it
involves learning a new language at the same time as
alphabetical coding and decoding, rather than, as in the
developed world, one AFTER the other,  Making the transition to
literacy in a language you don't ALREADY know is a mistake,
since it abandons the obvious idea that you can hear what you
are reading. It means that you are condemned to ex