Educators will want to assess carefully what can be learned about the literacy and schooling levels of their voters, in as much detail as possible, and will want to look for national or regional information that will help them to tailor their planning to reach voters that are functionally illiterate.
Literacy
Voter educators cannot presume literacy. Even industrialized and sophisticated societies with universal schooling generally have a percentage of people who are illiterate or semiliterate. In the southern hemisphere, illiteracy levels, which are often reported inaccurately, vary from 10 percent of the population to above 70 percent. These statistics obscure the fact that segments of the society may have different literacy levels.
In Peru "seventy-one percent of women are illiterate - nearly nine times as many as the proportion of men." [1] And this pattern is repeated through most developing countries. This discrimination against women provides the most obvious example of patterns of illiteracy that educators will want to discover. Within the borders of a country, there will be pockets where literacy levels are lower than others, for example in rural or remote areas. Within these pockets, there will also be variations where certain groups of people, such as women or the aged, have even higher levels of illiteracy.
Creating educational programmes that cater to the literate will obviously exclude the illiterate. Creating programmes that include the illiterate need not exclude the literate. And creating programmes in which there is an intentional emphasis on cooperative and oral learning will help ensure that both literate and illiterate people have an opportunity to learn.
Countries with high literacy levels have certain advantages. They can rely on the printed word more readily. But even in these countries, the traditionally disenfranchised - often the young, women, the poor - may not have very high levels of literacy. Educators will need to understand just how much people are willing to read and how much they can comprehend.
Schooling
Apart from literacy levels, educators may need to account for levels of schooling. There is obviously an overlap here. Many people learn to read at school. And those who do not learn to read often have been unable to attend or stay in school for very long.
Levels or years of schooling can also reveal to educators other things about likely levels of literacy. Schooling affects ways in which people are likely to understand other forms of education. It determines, for good or ill, how people value learning and which methods they are most likely to associate with educational programmes.
At the same time, voter education can be conducted independently, removed from the school room, and therefore free itself from the particular patterns of discipline, knowledge construction and dissemination, and competition for information and success associated with formal education.
Voter educators work at an advantage in societies that value education, particularly life-long learning. They benefit in cultures where schooling has encouraged democratic decision making and personal autonomy. They can also build on those schooling systems in which voter or civic education programmes have been incorporated into the formal or informal curriculum.
Understanding the patterns established by schooling systems in a country, therefore, will provide insight into the motivations and skills of the voting population. The recent upsurge in civic education at the school level, even in some long standing democracies, suggests that schooling in both traditional and even innovative or modern settings may not sufficiently prepare citizens for democracy in the absence of curricula specifically designed for this purpose. So educators of adults may not want to take it for granted that a literate and schooled society understands the complexities of modern democracies, even if they can assume that they will be able to read the pamphlets that explain how to register, and when and where to vote. Certainly, they may not assume that schooling inculcates the motivation and skills for civic participation (for more on this see Relationship Between General and Civic Education).
Notes:
[1] M. Kidron & R. Segal, The State of the World Atlas (Middlesex: Penguin, 1995).
