All of the countries that have been spectacularly successful at achieving 100 percent (or close) literacy are cou tries that are (or are have been until very recently) homogenous.  They include Japan and Korea (which have writing systems created especially for their populations -- Hangul in Korea, and addendums to kanji in Japan, katagana and hirigana.)
  Eastern Europe was ruled in literacy by the Soviet Union, and the Russian language was mandated, replacing, for example, Arabic, in countries such as Uzebekistan. Western Europen nations remained homogenous unto themselves until the recent onslaught of Islamic immigrants.  This has ripped apart the entire Western European educational sustem.
   
  In the United States, we have struggled to bring speakers of African-American dialect to approach the Standard Common American English required by literacy.  We now have to face the bicultural and bilingual and bilingual challange of hispanic immigrants, and the additional issues of other immigrants who come from logographic and syllabographic systems who may not be totally literate in their native language.
   
        

margery freeman <margeryfreeman at yahoo.com> wrote:
    Dear David and all,
   
  I look forward to this exciting and timely discussion of community literacy.  Additional questions that I'd like to see discussed:
    
   How can we learn from the experiences of other countries, particularly those that have built successful literacy movements?  
   What steps can we take to ensure that adult learners and other residents in the learners' communities are providing leadership to community literacy initiatives?  
   What do we mean by accountability to learners and their communities and how can we build this accountability into comunity literacy work?  
   what sort of training will best prepare community literacy coalitions to address community power dynamics, e.g. issues of racism, ethnocentrism?
  Thanks to all of you who are providing leadership for this conversation.
   
  Margery Freeman
   
    
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