Quote:
Originally Posted by MrsJoseph
There is no way to have a democratic nation without literacy.
|
I'm all for literacy, but are you sure about this? India had democracy, with an illiterate majority, for over forty years (before becoming 50 percent literate around 1990).
For the past decade or so, a lot of the best-setting non-fiction, in the US, has been on the theme that people of other political persuasions are all idiots or knaves. Maybe it would have been more helpful to democracy if the readers had been watching TV instead!
You can have democracy without literacy, and dictatorship with it.
What you can't have without literacy is economic prosperity.