We are told that the literacy rate among adult Jamaicans is currently about 88/89 per cent of the population. That’s low when compared to the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean, but also reflects considerable improvement since Jamaica’s political independence from former coloniser, Britain, in 1962.

Depending on the source, the number of adult Jamaicans able to read in the early 1960s may have been just in excess of 50 per cent, or as low as less than 40 per cent of the population.

Illiteracy was intolerably high among the poor everywhere — especially so in deep rural Jamaica.

We know that the situation hadn’t improved by much when then newly installed Prime Minister Mr Michael Manley launched an adult literacy programme in the early 1970s.

An extraordinarily charismatic personality and enthralling speaker, Mr Manley motivated young people — some still in high school — to tread the highways, byways, hills, and valleys to bring out their illiterate elders so they could teach them to read and write.

It was an example of volunteer-driven community mobilisation, the like of which we do not believe has been replicated here.

Sadly, like several other progressive projects of that time, the adult literacy programme — which by 1974 became the Jamaican Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL) and eventually evolved to the Jamaica Foundation for Lifelong Learning — suffered because of the bitter ideological divide of the 1970s.

Yet, as Mr Paul Burke, a former People’s National Party general secretary is reported as suggesting, the programme made a huge positive difference.

We are at one with Mr Burke’s assertion that “…JAMAL was liberating, it empowered, and it gave dignity to people.”

Now, half-a-century later, we hear of a ‘lag’ in the adult literacy rate over the last decade.

We suspect that over the next few years the figures may actually get worse as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic which kept children out of physical school for a significant period — the poorest suffering most because of inadequate to zero access to online technologies.

It seems to us that in 2024, and going forward, focused emphasis in education needs to be on ensuring that all children learn to read at basic and primary levels. It shouldn’t be that students are entering and even leaving high schools functionally illiterate — which continues to happen in Jamaica.

Our educators and community leaders know who those children are. Invariably they are from impoverished homes headed by adults, themselves unable to read.

Many go to school only infrequently, or not at all, which are fatal weaknesses dating back to the post-Emancipation period more than 180 years ago. That’s when school doors were first opened to the formerly enslaved.

Volunteerism today may not come as instinctively and easily as it did 50 years ago when the adult literacy programme got off to a flying start. But socially conscious people, such as Mrs Sanya Goffe and her husband Gavin, are still around, ready to voluntarily assist properly organised programmes to improve their country and people, including elimination of illiteracy.

Crucially, our Government should heed advice from literacy expert Dr Yewande Lewis-Fokum to “Invest resources into educational institutions that cater to children coming from the poorest households…”

As far as we can make out, not nearly enough of that is happening.