We hear more and more from progressive economists about the importance of what they call “human capital.” Human capital is defined as the stock of useful, valuable, and relevant knowledge built up in the process of education and training.
Literacy is the key to building human capital and human capital is the vital ingredient in building a nation. There is no industrial society today with an adult literacy rate of less than 80 percent. No illiterate society has ever become an industrial tiger of any stripe.
A key strategy for creating sufficient and appropriate human capital is to focus on basic education for all children. As Gabriela Mistral has so poignantly said, “We are guilty of many crimes, but our worst sin is abandoning the child; neglecting the foundation of life. Many of the things we need can wait; the child cannot. We cannot answer Tomorrow. Her name is Today.”
But it's not enough to inveigh against the lamentable state of our country's literacy. What is striking from the international experience is that whenever and wherever basic education was spread, the social and economic benefits have been quite impressive and visible. The development strategies followed in recent decades by Japan, the East Asian industrializing tigers, and China laid a firm basis for equitable growth by massive investment in basic education for all. Literacy was fundamental not only to accelerating the economic growth of these countries but to distributing resources more equitably and thereby to empowering more people.
It is a truism today that economic success everywhere is based on educational success. And literacy is the basic building block of education. It is not just an end in itself: literacy leads to many social benefits, including improvements in standards of hygiene, reduction in infant and child mortality rates, decline in population growth rates, increase in labor productivity, rise in civic consciousness, greater political empowerment and democratization — and even an improved sense of national unity, as people become more aware than before of the country they belong to and the opportunities beyond their immediate horizons.
Literacy is also a basic component of social cohesion and national identity. The foundations for a conscious and active citizenship are often laid in school. Literacy plays a key role in the building of democracy; Kerala provides a striking example of how higher levels of literacy lead to a more aware and informed public. Adult literacy in Kerala is nearly 100 percent, compared to the Indian average of 62 percent. As a result, nearly half of the adult population in Kerala reads a daily newspaper, compared to less than 20 percent elsewhere in India. One out of every four rural laborers reads a newspaper regularly compared to less than 2 percent of agricultural workers in the rest of the country. So literacy leads directly to an improvement in the depth and quality of public opinion, as well as to more active participation of the poor in the democratic process.
Amartya Sen, the polymath Nobel laureate in economics, has reminded us that “the elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy, and of needless inequalities in opportunities [are] objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value.” We sometimes forget that in his most famous poem, the other Nobel Prize — winning Bengali, the immortal poet Rabindranath Tagore, implicitly spoke of education as fundamental to his dream for India. It was in a place “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where knowledge is free” and “where the mind is led forward… into ever-widening thought and action” that Tagore hoped his India would awake to freedom. Such a mind is, of course, one that can only be developed and shaped by literacy.
But more prosaically, illiteracy must be fought for practical reasons. How are we going to cope with the twenty-first century, the information age, if half our population cannot sign their name or read a newspaper, let alone use a computer keyboard or surf the Net? Tomorrow's is the information age: the world will be able to tell the rich from the poor not by GNP figures but by their Internet connections. Illiteracy is a self-imposed handicap in a race we have no choice but to run.
But it is also essential to focus on one specific aspect of the literacy challenge in our country today. The saddest aspect of India's literacy statistics is the disproportionate percentage of women who remain illiterate. Sixty percent of India's illiterates are women. Female literacy (43 percent) was 26 percentage points below the male literacy (69 percent). No society has ever liberated itself economically, politically, or socially without a sound base of educated women.
One of the more difficult questions I used to find myself being asked as a United Nations official, especially when I had been addressing a generalist audience, was: What is the single most important thing that can be done to improve the world? It's the kind of question that tends to bring out the bureaucrat in the most direct of communicators, as one feels obliged to explain how complex the challenges confronting humanity are; how no one task alone can be singled out over other goals; how the struggle for peace, the fight against poverty, the battle to eradicate disease, must all be waged side by side — and so mind-numbingly on. But of late I have cast my caution to the winds and ventured an answer to this most impossible of questions. If I had to pick the one thing we must do above all else, I now offer a two-word mantra: “Educate girls.”
It really is that simple. There is no action proven to do more for the human race than the education of the female child. Scholarly studies and research projects have established what common sense might already have told us: if you educate a boy, you educate a person, but if you educate a girl, you educate a family and benefit an entire community.
The evidence is striking. Increased schooling of mothers has a measurable impact on the health of their children, on the future schooling of the child, and on the child's adult productivity. The children of educated mothers consistently outperform children with educated fathers and illiterate mothers. Given that they spend most of their time with their mothers, this is hardly surprising.
A girl who has had more than six years of education is better equipped to seek and use medical and health care advice, to immunize her children, to be aware of sanitary practices from boiling water to the importance of washing hands. A World Bank project in Africa established that the children of women with just five years of school had a 40 percent better survival rate than the children of women who had less than five years in class. A Yale University study showed that the heights and weights for newborn children of women with a basic education were consistently higher than those of babies born to uneducated women. A UNESCO study demonstrated that giving women just a primary school education decreases child mortality by 5 to 10 percent.
The health advantages of education extend beyond childbirth. The dreaded disease AIDS spreads twice as fast, a Zambian study shows, among uneducated girls than among those who have been to school. Educated girls marry later, and are less susceptible to abuse by older men. And educated women tend to have fewer children, space them more wisely, and so look after them better; women with seven years’ education, according to one study, had two or three fewer children than women with no schooling. The World Bank, with the mathematical precision for which they are so famous, has estimated that for every four years of education, fertility is reduced by about one birth per mother.
The more girls that go to secondary school, the Bank adds, the higher the country's per capita income growth. And when girls work in the fields, as so many have to do across the developing world, their schooling translates directly to increased agricultural productivity, which in turn leads to a decline in malnutrition. The marvelous thing about women is that they like to learn from other women, so the success of educated women is usually quickly emulated by their uneducated sisters. And women spend increased income on their families, which men do not necessarily do (rural toddy shops in India, after all, thrive on the self-indulgent spending habits of men). Educate a girl, and you benefit a community: QED.