THE POWER OF NEWSPRINT

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2018/11/27/the-power-of-newsprint/

• Publishers appear to be unaware of this potent tool in their hands

Pakistan, with its poor literacy figures, needs to improve them by making a concerted “one, two, three…Pull!” effort, because literacy is important. Studies show that literacy impacts on population growth, its health and the mental state of individuals.

Education is one of the best things a person can possess, but there can be no formal education without literacy. So, while both are crucial, literacy is the more urgent of the two.

Teaching a person to read isn’t easy. In a positive development there is much more and better reading material available now than there was a few years ago: colourful, well-illustrated books for children using clearly written letters and words, and for adults, books with interesting but simple content to encourage a reading habit. The OUP (Oxford University Press) has made some great contributions in this context. But still, the most easily available reading material is a newspaper.

Hot roasted peanuts, channa choor, fabric, dishes… these and many other things are wrapped in newspapers in lieu of bags; newspapers are also a commonly used packing material in crates of fruit and are used in many other ways. This makes a newspaper the single most likely reading material to be freely available in even a poor, illiterate household.

Yet newspaper publishers appear to be unaware of this potent tool in their hands, and a glance at the average Urdu newspapers is enough to drive one to despair. Letters scrambling one on top of the other, interwoven with vines, squiggles, curlicues, and other elaborate decorative items… what a waste of a resource, and what an example of thoughtlessness.

There are government schools and colleges, but private educational facilities for the disadvantaged sector of society are more than a match for what the government provides. There are many Trusts, individuals and NGOs involved in the field and they are doing excellent work. No one can say that people are either unaware or negligent regarding the importance of literacy. But still, a lot of work needs to be done. The point about newspapers being crucial is worth considering.

Perhaps newspaper owners throughout the country could put their heads together and come up with a plan at very little cost to themselves?

The desperate situation we find ourselves in in this country calls for cunning measures. With the population where it is at present, few people are likely to have funds left over after housing and feeding the family to invest in books and school. People who can afford them buy books, but they generally don’t give these books away. Newspapers on the other hand are either thrown away or sold off. Which only means that a person with a newspaper will not mind giving away segments or even the entire paper to someone who needs it. So, even though newspapers may not be a conventional aid to literacy, nothing prevents them from being a creative and viable route towards achieving it. For adults looking to learn English, newspapers with news regarding everyday life may be more interesting than stories, because they deal with every individual’s day to day concerns. It might be more interesting to read about Imran Khan and his U-turns, about why the CJP imagines he should be allowed to dock people’s salaries for the purpose of making a dam, and about the Kartarpur corridor …than about how Surayya’s doll was both short and fat, and whatever else it was.

Perhaps newspaper owners throughout the country could put their heads together and come up with a plan at very little cost to themselves? Perhaps they could each devote a very small section of their newspaper for the use of people with poorer reading skills. This applies to English and Urdu papers both, but Urdu papers might also re-assess the font they use, and how to make it easier to read. A student trying to learn from an Urdu paper has started sticking a little symbol rather like a dangling earring under her words. When I asked her why she pointed to the daily Urdu newspaper lying beside her and said: It’s like this one, here.

She was right. It was there, everywhere, and it didn’t make any sense in the newspaper either.