1.2mn youths, adults remain illiterate in Sri Lanka: Education Minister

By Chaturanga Samarawickrama  

At least 1.2 million youths and adults in the country’s population  still remain illiterate, Education Minister Prof. G.L. Pieris said.  
He said the projects that were implemented to increase the literacy should be expanded.  

“School-level access committees to provide sustainable solutions through the national education system should also be increased to achieve the 100% literacy,” the Minister said.  
He said the countries like North Korea, Cuba, Ukraine, Russia, Poland and the Philippines had obtained higher literacy rates.   

“We should give a sensitive attention to those countries’ literacy rates. These countries will explain a wide change of the education system,” the Minister said.  
The UNICEF Innovation Fund announced the global celebrations of International Literacy Day on September 8 under the theme ‘Literacy teaching and learning in the COVID-19 crisis and beyond’, especially on the role of educators and changing pedagogies.   

“The theme highlights literacy learning in a lifelong learning perspective, and therefore, mainly focuses on youth and adults. The recent COVID-19 crisis had been a stark reminder of the existing gap between policy discourse and reality,” it is said.   

A gap that already existed in the pre-COVID-19 era  negatively affected the learning of youth and adults, who had either no or low literacy skills, and therefore, tended to face multiple disadvantages.  

During this week’s literacy celebration, the Education Ministry had advised all Provincial Educational Secretaries, Provincial Educational Directors and Zonal Education Directors on conducting literacy programmes at school level.