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Remarks by Timothy Balding, Director General, World Association of Newspapers, at the International Literacy Day celebrations organized at Unesco, Paris, 8 September 1999 Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen It is an honour and privilege for me to address this distinguished gathering today on behalf of the World Asssocation of Newspapers, the global organization for publishers and editors. WAN groups in its membership more than 17,000 daily newspapers in 93 countries, together with 17 national and international news agencies and seven regional press organizations. We communicate on a regular basis with newspapers in one hundred and forty-three countries and it is my belief that we can - and should be - major allies of all of you in the vital work of promoting world-wide literacy. With this ceremony here at UNESCO today, WAN concludes its 3rd international Newspapers in Education conference, which has brought more than one hundred and fifty publishers, editors, commercial managers and journalists from newspapers in Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, Asia, Australasia and Europe to Paris these last three days. WAN estimates that some 380 million copies of newspapers are sold each day in the world to be read by about one billion people, which makes newspapers one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single source of written information on our planet. I am happy to say that the international community of newspapers is paying greater attention than ever before to its role not only as a provider of information to young people but as a strong potential force in the whole educational process. As a reflection of this, WAN has placed activities to increase reading as a very high priority in the organization's 1998-2000 Action Plan. Specifically, the Plan commits WAN:
At mid-point in our Action Plan we have taken numerous measures already to further these objectives and I can assure you that we shall continue in the next year and beyond to consider them a top priority. WAN places tremendous emphasis on the defence and promotion of freedom of the press and we see an obvious and important link between the formation of literate, well-informed and tolerant young citizens, open to the exchange of ideas and to other cultures, and the very strength and meaning of democratic and free societies. This is the ethos and justification behind our involvement, in Newspapers in Education and Young Reader programmes, which are the exclusive focus of one of the four main activity sectors of WAN, which works to introduce and encourage these projects in both developed and developing and transitional nations, where we believe that they can make an important contribution to helping resolve the serious problems of illiteracy. At our NIE Conference here in Paris this week, which was entitled 'Reading for Life', there was much evidence of the positive contribution that newspapers can make to promoting an improvement in educational standards and, more broadly, to creating life-long readers interested and active in the societies and world in which they live. We heard, for example, of the initiative of a South African newspaper - the Sunday Times - which has launched a major offensive to help overcome the critical shortage of learning materials in the country's schools. When the government proved unable to provide schoolchildren with the textbooks they needed to join South Africa's new education programme, the newspaper stepped into the breach and published the entire syllabus, which was used as basic education tools by hundreds of rural and urban schools across the nation. The Times has now taken this initiative a step further by publishing a weekly supplement packed with learning resources, which not only reaches regular readers of the paper and their families but is distributed - 35,000 copies each week - to nine hundred rural and township schools, the vast majority of which do not have libraries or, for example, storybooks for their children. This initiative, like many others of its kind, promotes not only literacy and education, but democratic values, cultural and religious tolerance and a multilingual society. We heard also of a newspaper in Northern Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph, which is playing a vital role in bringing greater understanding and tolerance to children across the sectarian divide through its reading and writing activities. Or the Korean newspaper, the JoongAng Ilbo, which is helping children through reading and writing to come to grips with the terrible facts of war and death, in this case in Kosovo. Or the French regional newspapers which are going into schools in tough neighbourhoods throughout the country with learning exercises and materials to aid children to confront the destructive problems of drugs and violence. And, of course, there was much talk about internet, which newspapers are embracing and in many cases are using to link classes, schools and children in different countries or simply in their own communities. As one editor who brings thousands and thousands of children to his newspaper to learn in its own multi-media classroom, said: 'The Internet is helping young people rediscover the joys of reading and writing'. Yes, I am strongly convinced that newspapers have a very important role to play in the essential work that UNESCO and its partners are seeking to accomplish in promoting literacy and I think we can do more together. This is not to say that we have not already started: we have worked recently with UNESCO and the Education For All Forum to help introduce NIE programmes in five anglophone and eleven francophone countries. This is an ongoing project, involving newspapers, schools and education authorities which we hope will be instrumental in helping to solve, as in the South African case I mentioned earlier, some of the problems associated with the shortage of textbook materials. At the same time, WAN and EFA last year jointly published a Newspapers in Adult Education sourcebook, which through case studies from all over the world demonstrated how newspapers can contribute to meet the basic learning needs of adults and help fight the scourge of adult illiteracy. As Michael Lakin, the EFA Executive Secretary said in his preface to this book: 'newspapers can be used as 'living textbooks' to bridge the real world and the classroom....Studies have shown that using newspapers in education helps students increase their vocabulary and comprehension'. It is my pleasure today to formally launch a new project between WAN, UNESCO and the EFA Forum - a world-wide survey to find out what young people will answer when asked 'What if there was nothing to read?' It's a truly fascinating question and I personally look forward with impatience to seeing some of the results. We hope to persuade hundreds of newspapers across the world to cooperate with this project and to address their young readers, both directly through their own columns and through their established NIE links with teachers and schools. The EFA Foum and WAN will present the results of the survey at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, next April, an event intended to diagnose the state of basic education in the world at the end of the 'Education for All Decade ' and to agree on common action to meet the challenges and problems facing basic education in the 21st century. We hope that our joint survey will give the world community a chance to understand the importance of literacy in young people's lives. In addition to this new initiative, I look forward to discussing with many of you how WAN and its newspaper members can continue to increase cooperation on literacy projects The new survey is not, in fact, the first of its kind for WAN. In 1995 we cooperated with UNICEF on a similar 'opinion poll' on the Rights of the Child, asking young readers to express their views on the state of the world and their personal solutions for improving it. The response to the 'Give a Voice to the Children' survey, as we called it, was astonishing, with tens of thousands of children putting their pens to paper to express their views, which were often moving, often surprising, often quite radical, often melancholic. One of them has stuck in my mind to this day and to end my remarks on a light and equally profound note I would like to offer it to you for reflection: 'I reckon', said the young child, 'that if everyone were to learn to juggle, all our problems would be solved. When you are juggling, you forget about everything, and all you can think about is the juggling '. Thank you. + Back to Daily News
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