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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: arun gera who wrote (7514)	7/9/2006 4:17:40 PM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218118

Not sure what the author's agenda is, other than trying to pop a ballon of inflated expectations. The Sergey Brin item seems like it was from a longer, more complex comparison, which may have been severly cut by an editor. It is useful to remember, often a writer produces a few complex, nuanced paragraphs, and some editor on a deadline slashes 95% of it, then puts together two parts of sentences so it fits the page. The literacy numbers were shocking to me. The literacy numbers from the CIA factbook - ( BTW, First thing I ever looked up in the CIA factbook was the exact date of a holiday in Hong Kong. The date was wrong.) Cuba 97% Costa Rica 96% Mexico 92% El Salvador 80% Guatamela 70% Brazil 86.4% male 86.7% female 86.1% China 90.9% male 95.0% female 86.5% India 59.5% male 70.2% female 48.3% For India, this means Mommy can't teach her children how to read. With a large percentage of Indians not able to go to school, this problem will persist. For the first time in a long time, I will say something nice about the Cuban Commies- Cuba solved their literacy problem in about a decade- half a generation - by pushing an "each one teach one" plan, and printing massive numbers of reading primers, including those oriented to adult learners. Of course, there was lots of propaganda in these books, class warfare, and other questionable stuff. I believe the "volunteered" all the high shool graduates and most college kids to make this work. Now, of course, only about half the population of readers can really teach effectively, but that is still enough people to get started. Also, the Cuban programm is not a state secret, I expect they would be very happy to show how it was done. For cost, I would guess under $30 USD for materials per learner, and maybe $40 compensation for the "teachers". For 50 million people a year, that would require about $3.5 Billion a year. About 80% of that could be gotten from Europe, the US, Japan, IMF, World Bank, not to mention various billionaries. In five years, then 250 million people could be literate, or 25% of the population. That would mean roughly 85% literacy. The next 10 years could be funded at a much lower level to get near about 90%. Arun, what are the chances of something like this happening soon ?