Rising illiteracy

from a U.S. correspondent An article in the November issue of Scientific American discuss~ es the rise in world illiteracy revealed by recent United Nations statistics. "The continuing rise in world population", it says, "has caused an alarming reversal of past trends favoring an increase in world literacy." It considers the U.N. figures themselves alarming - of a rise of 200 million in the world's population of illiterates during the past six years, as suspect and quotes the Population Reference Bureau's opinion of the figures as "an optimistic underestimate." The Bureau, which is a privately supported organisation concerned with demographic forecasting, characterises the developing coun~ tries' low per capita income, malnutrition and illiteracy as a "three-way feedback" problen. "The single nation with the largest problem is India, where only 55 million out of 187 million school-age children, or less than 30 per cent, go to school, and the government's expenditure per pupil per year is no more than 32 cents. In contrast, Federal, state and local government support of education in the U.S. totals some 600 dollars per pupil per year, a figure that does not include the 11.5 billion dollars spent by private colleges and schools. "In Latin America, although the school situation is more favorable than in Asia or Africa, dropouts increase with each grade. In Brazil, for example, the average number of school years conpleted by each pupil is 2.6, and only 10 per cent reach eighth grade. Considering the likelihood that at least a minimum of education is a prerequisite for population control, the bureau finds it significant that nearly 85 per cent of the births today occur in the nations where 70 per cent of the children have no school to go to. ..... Half of the adult population of Africa, Latin America and non-Communist Asia, a total of almost 750 million, have received no schooling at all, and only 30 per cent of these nations' 373 million school-age children are now in schools of any kind."