There is an old Bengali saying that knowledge is a very special commodity: the more you give away, the more you have left. Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver - the teachers, the parents, the friends. This old insight is worth recollecting on this wonderful occasion: the celebration of the International Literacy Day.

Since the terrible events of 11th September last year - and what followed after that - the world has been very aware of problems of insecurity. But insecurity comes in many different ways - not just though terrorism and violence. It is remarkable that for nearly every kind of human insecurity, education can have a preventive role - a constructive contribution to make.
The first - and perhaps the most basic issue (is) the fact that illiteracy and innumeracy are forms of insecurity in themselves. Not to be able to read or write or count or communicate is a tremendous deprivation.

Second, basic education can be very important in helping people to get jobs and gainful employment. Any country that neglects basic education tends to doom its illiterate people to inadequate access to the opportunities of global commerce. A person who cannot read instructions, understand the demands of accuracy, and follow the demands of specifications is at a great disadvantage in getting a job in today's globalizing world.

Not surprisingly, all the cases of successful use of the opportunities of global commerce for the reduction of poverty have involved the route of basic education on a wide basis. Already in the mid-nineteenth century the task was seen with remarkable clarity in Japan. The Fundamental Code of Education, issued in 1872 (shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868), expressed the public commitment to make sure that there must be "no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an illiterate person." By 1910 Japan was almost fully literate, at least for the young, and by 1913, though still very much poorer than Britain or America, Japan was publishing more books than Britain and more than twice as many as the United States.

Later on, China, Taiwan, South Korea and other economies in East Asia followed similar routes and firmly focused on basic education. In explaining their rapid economic progress, their willingness to make good use of the global market economy is often praised, and rightly so. But that process was greatly helped by the achievements of these countries in basic education.

Third, when people are illiterate, their ability to understand and invoke their legal rights can be very limited. This can be a severe handicap for those whose rights are violated by others, and it tends to be a persistent problem for people at the bottom of the ladder, whose rights are often effectively alienated because of their inability to read and see what they are entitled to demand and how.

This is a particularly important issue for women's security, since women are often deprived of their due, thanks to illiteracy. Indeed, not being able to read or write is a significant barrier for underprivileged women, since this can lead to their failure to make use even of the rather limited rights they may legally have (say, to own land, or other property, or to appeal against unfair judgment and unjust treatment.

Fourth, illiteracy can also muffle political opportunities, by reducing the ability to participate in the political arena and to express demands effectively. This can contribute directly to their insecurity, since the absence of voice in politics can entail a severe reduction of influence and the likelihood of just treatment.

Fifth, empirical work in recent years has brought out very clearly how the respect and regard for women's well-being is strongly influenced by such variables as women's ability to earn an independent income, to find employment outside the home, to have ownership rights, and to have literacy and be educated participants in decisions within and outside the family. Indeed, even the survival disadvantage of women compared with men in many developing countries (which leads to such terrible phenomenon as tens of millions of "missing women") seems to go down sharply - and may even get eliminated - with progress in women's empowerment, for which literacy is a basic ingredient.

These different factors (such as, female literacy and education, women's earning power, their economic role outside the family, women's property rights, and so on) may at first sight appear to be rather diverse and disparate influences that somehow work together, but what they all have in common is their positive contribution to women's greater independence and empowerment.

There is also much evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children. The influence works through many channels, but perhaps most it works through the importance that mothers typically attach to the welfare of the children, and the opportunity they have to influence family decisions in that direction. These connections between basic education of women and their empowerment are quite central to understanding the contribution of school education to human security in general.

Recently the perspective of a "clash of civilizations" (promoted by a great many commentators, including intellectuals as well as political leaders) has gained much currency, and what is most immediately divisive in this outlook is not the idea of the inevitability of a clash (that too, but it comes later), but the prior insistence on seeing human beings in terms of one dimension only: as a member of one civilization or another. As it happens, every human being has many identities, related to nationality, language, location, class, religion, occupation, political beliefs, and so on. To ignore everything other than some single, allegedly profound, way of classifying people is to set them up into warring camps. The best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations, and we need not see ourselves as being rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups, which confront each other.

While we celebrate the power of literacy, we have reason to think also about the content of education and the way literacy can facilitate - rather than endanger - peace and security. The importance of non-sectarian and non-parochial curricula that expand, rather than reduce, the reach of reason can be hard to exaggerate.

To conclude, we must go on fighting for basic education for all, but also emphasize the importance of the content of education. We have to make sure that sectarian schooling does not convert education into a prison, rather than being a passport to the wide world.

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Professor Amartya Sen was born in Bengal, India (now Bangladesh) in 1933. Today he lives and works at Cambridge in the United Kingdom, where he is Master of Trinity College. His major publications include: On Economic Inequality, Poverty and Famines, and On Ethics and Economics. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to welfare economics. He considers literacy as one of his �old obsessions�, along with basic health care and gender equity.

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Source: UNESCO