How to cultivate literacy skills in this 21st century

After reading Dr Wole Oladapo‘s last article on The Guardian Newspaper and a couple of comments under it, I feel that sarcasm now needs to be taught in our secondary schools and universities—and of course by experts and brilliant writers like him.

It appears that the reading culture of many Nigerian students is low, and even more worrisome is their inability to comprehend written texts and bring critical thinking into a body of sentences.

In a society that celebrates material possessions, glorifies influential personalities who cannot read critically nor write intelligible sentences, and reveres entertaining people who command a lot of social media followers, even when basic literacy skills are lacking among its youth, I find this norm utterly disturbing and unsettling.

Secondary school and university students now seem comfortably lazy to read long pieces of information or a long article on social media and online newspapers, but they can spend long hours watching comedy skits and Instagram reels. Reading is now seen as burdensome, and as an uphill task, and they cannot write a sentence or two that are devoid of grammatical blunder.

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How does a society progress when a number of young people living in it no longer read at all or read constructively, or where they read just to register their sentiments or vent their pent-up anger? How can these people contribute to national discourse or even make informed decisions to elect good (or better) leaders when they cannot spend a small portion of their time to read? Or when they read only what supports or solidifies their biases? How can schools focus more on literacy (reading and writing) in English language or even in any language?

In some of my English classes at TBOSE Tutorial, a pre-varsity tutorial, my students—and these are prospective university students—participate in writing, public speaking and debate on topics that border on suicide, social media use, abortion, teenage pregnancies, digital banking and fraud, and you name it. As a language teacher, I see this approach to learning as immensely useful for their writing and reading skills. In my subsequent classes with them, I would incorporate political discussions and history into the learning process with a view to making them vote good or better leaders.

In my interaction with a number of students in high schools and universities, I have found out that the common practice is that some of them now focus on money-making ventures and stubbornly refuse to participate in anything reading or writing. The reading culture among these people who are highly fixated on making money is now at a low ebb. And it is going to be worse in a few years. For many graduates, I can conclude from what I have seen that reading stops the moment they get their degrees or finish their NYSC.

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I think what many people do not know is that reading and writing provoke individuals into critical thinkers. They help in making better decisions. Even writing itself helps in organization of one’s thoughts and invariably one’s presentation. The saying, readers are leaders, is still ever true; in this Information Age, the extent to which you can lead people depends on what you know or the quality of knowledge at your disposal. More so, the extent to which you can lead people depends on how well you can write, join strings of words to communicate what you know effectively.

Literacy in the 21st century is about constructing and more importantly validating knowledge. Young people need to read on a myriad of subjects to make sense out of this multicultural, multimedia, and multi-religious world.

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Literacy can also help build their awareness and problem-solving skills which result in better approach to and management of life’s challenges and problems prevalent in this present dispensation.