The illiteracy of power by Melina Barnett

International Literacy Day comes nowadays the uncomfortable question, what happens when governments begin travelling in the opposite direction?

The irony of our age is extraordinary. UNESCO describes literacy as a fundamental human right, yet hundreds of millions of adults still lack basic literacy skills, while millions of children remain outside school. In 2026, as International Literacy Day marks its 60th anniversary, the world is still arguing about something that should have been settled generations ago: whether every child deserves an education.

And increasingly, the argument is not simply about poverty or war. It is also about politics. In the United States, the world's self-appointed champion of freedom, public education has increasingly become a battlefield. Schools are dragged into ideological wars over history, books, race, gender, religion, science and what children should be permitted to know. Education is treated less as a public good than as territory to be conquered.

This is not merely an American problem. Across wealthy democracies, public education is being squeezed by austerity, privatisation, political interference and the growing conviction that anything publicly funded must somehow justify its existence to people who would rather sell it.

There is something profoundly absurd about this. A government can spend billions on weapons, subsidies, infrastructure and tax arrangements, but somehow a properly funded school becomes an extravagance. A library is described as a burden. A teacher's salary becomes a political argument. A child's access to a decent education becomes dependent upon the postcode into which that child happened to be born.

We should call this what it is: the privatisation of opportunity. Education was never simply about producing workers who could read instructions. It was about producing citizens capable of questioning them. That distinction matters enormously.

An authoritarian government does not particularly fear an educated population because educated people know Shakespeare, algebra or chemistry. It fears them because educated people are harder to deceive. They ask inconvenient questions. They compare promises with results. They recognise propaganda. They understand history sufficiently to notice when politicians begin recycling its darkest chapters.

Literacy, therefore, is political power. That is why the modern assault on education should concern everybody, including those who never intend to enter a classroom again. When schools are weakened, democracy itself becomes weaker. When reading declines, manipulation becomes easier. When critical thinking is treated as ideological contamination, nonsense acquires political value.

And now literacy means more than reading a printed sentence. In a digital world, people must also be able to navigate algorithms, misinformation, artificial intelligence, manipulated images and oceans of deliberately manufactured nonsense. UNESCO itself increasingly frames literacy as involving the ability to access, understand, evaluate and create information responsibly.

The irony is almost unbearable: humanity has created more information than any previous civilisation, while some politicians appear determined to create citizens less capable of understanding it.

International Literacy Day should therefore not be another ceremonial occasion for politicians to photograph themselves beside children holding books. It should be an accusation. If education is a right, fund it. If literacy is essential to democracy, protect it.

If children are the future, stop treating their schools as convenient places to conduct today's culture wars. A society that deliberately makes education harder to access should not be surprised when ignorance becomes easier to govern. The greatest danger is not that people cannot read. It is that those in power discover how useful that can be.