Human survival means more than purely physical survival. Human beings, because of language, also have a cultural nature that must survive. In today's world, all speak, but more than one-fourth of the world's people--and more than half in developing nations--do not have the uniquely human capacity of reading and writing. The diffusion of literacy…

There is a close connection between illiteracy and poverty at all levels--global, national, and subnational; the countries with the lowest levels of literacy are also the poorest economically. Poverty breeds illiteracy by forcing children to drop out of school to work, and these illiterate people are forced to stay on the lowest levels of the work…

The advent of the "information age," and the electronic communication technologies that are part of it, was supposed to replace print. However, this has not been the case, as the amount of print materials being produced and read has increased along with the electronic equipment. Far from replacing established media and communication…