ABSTRACT
If education offered little else except lasting literacy to all who spent a few years at school, quite a few states in the world would be happy enough. These would include the states of countries both rich and poor (‘Open File’, 1987). True, schools are proving ineffective in imparting literary skills in many countries of the First as well as the Third World, but the problem is far more grim in the latter. How many more illiterates India will have, and what percentage of the world’s illiterates will belong to India at the turn of the twenty-first century have become staple statistical crescendos of conference speeches. Evidently, India’s performance in the pursuit of mass literacy is the central theme of the dismal system of education. The expansion of the education system, accomplished at a very substantial cost, has not had any striking impact on literacy.
