Literacy without formal education: the case of Pakistan

✍ Scribed by Samina Nazli

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 112 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.765

✦ Synopsis

functioning separately or as an important part of a broader activity and designed for some identi®able clientele and educational objective. 6 It has a shorter time horizon.

Informal education is a process that continues throughout a person's life whereby each individual acquires attitudes, values, skills and knowledge through everyday experiences, through the educational in¯uences and resources of his or her environment, namely family, neighbours, work-place and leisure, in the market, the library and through the mass communication media. 7 In other words, literacy can be acquired through personal efforts and motivation without having to go through the formal education system, especially when a suf®cient number of literate persons are around. Our hypothesis for this paper is that the larger the number of educated people (as measured by education density) in an area, the higher will be the literacy rate as illiterate persons will become literate through their personal efforts.

A large number of projects have been initiated worldwide to target groups of illiterate people who have missed out for one reason or another, on formal education. Such alternative or non-formal approaches to raising the literacy level have been introduced in