Today is International Literacy Day. (It’s also three months until my 30th birthday, but that’s nothing to celebrate …) The “holiday” was first started by the UN on September 8, 2003, and we’ll celebrate it until September 8, 2012.
I suppose the theory is that we won’t have to celebrate it afterward because there will be no more illiteracy by then? A nice idea, sure, but I have a hunch we should keep scheduling this “holiday” indefinitely.
(Incidentally, I learned of International Literacy Day only because someone on Twitter wrote, “Happy Illiteracy!” That, of course, caught my eye because illiteracy is nothing to celebrate. The writer was probably making a joke, but when I Googled “International Illiteracy Day,” it seems that a few organizations elsewhere in the world actually do refer to September 8 as such. This makes me wonder: Is this just a translation issue? Or do non-Western countries have a different perception of literacy and illiteracy?
