ABSTRACT
At the World Conference on Education for All, held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, governments around the world pledged to intensify their efforts to provide Basic Education to all their citizens. Basic Education is conceived as ‘primary…education for children, as well as education in literacy, general knowledge and life skills for youth and adults’ (WCEFA 1990:ix). This pledge to provide literacy as part of a strategy of Education for All is underpinned by a view of literacy as neutral and universal, or ‘autonomous’ (Street 1984). In this chapter, we draw on two and a half years of ethnographic research among the Rabaris of Kachchh, a nomadic1 group from Gujarat in the west of India, to illustrate some of the ways in which Rabaris’ perceptions of ‘literacy’ contribute to an alternative view: that literacy is not neutral and singular, but that literacies are plural, social and therefore ‘ideological’ practices (Street 1984 and this volume).
