WAR ON IGNORANCE

Evening Star, Issue 20060, 28 December 1928, Page 1

WAR ON IGNORANCE

RUSSIA!! MOVEMENT “DRIVE FOR CULTURE" .All over the city one can see squads of young people ringing house door bells and asking who is illiterate and who wishes to learn to read and write, marching into the cheaper restaurants and making notes as to cleanliness, studying the number of liquor stores in the vicinity of largo factories. This is tho “ kulturni pokhod,” or drive for culture, which has been launched all over the Socict Union under the special auspices of the Union of Communist Youth. The primary objective of the “ drive for _ culture,” which will last over a. period of several weeks and end with a special day devoted to work on behalf of the needs of the schools, is to speed up tho campaign against illiteracy, which has been lagging of laic. .Secondary objects are to .clean up restaurants and oilier public places frequented by workers ami to stimulate agitation against the drink evil. The idea of a. mas,-; competition among cities, factories, and institutions to reduce illiteracy originated with Nikolai Lenin’s widow. Mine Naclyczhda Krupskaya; and llio call for the cultural drive was sounded by President Kalinin, who is also head of the society “Down with Illiteracy.” Kalinin’s appeal reads in part as follows; “ War, pitiless war, is declared on ignorance, illiteracy, drunkenness, diM, and laziness. . . . Build new schools, repair the school buildings; supply the school with study materia!, ITiol, clean and comfortable conditions; provide'the children of poor peasants and larm labourers with shoes and clothes, boo!;-', and writing materials. Give tho children of/liic winkers and the poor free hot breakfasts.” In Moscow alone there are about 00,000 illiterates between tho ages of one and thirty-live. For many years the trade unions and tho society “Down ’With Illiteracy” have carried on work to reduce illiteracy, establishing instruction centres where people may come in their free lime and learn to read and write. A vigorous houso-to-liouso canvass, however, lias revealed many classes of people who have not been reached by earlier nllorts, especially in the remote suburbs of the city, where people live mostly in isolated little wooden houses. MISSIONARIES OF LITERACY. The missionaries of literacy meet with a varied reception. Some of the people whom they visit arc passive and indifferent, observing; “So far we got along without knowing how to read and write, and wo can go ou in the same way.” Others arc eager to learn. Sometimes an illiterate woman interposes the objection that she cannot leave her child; in these cases tho more zealous of the educational crusaders volunteer to come to tho house ana give individual lessons. In one place the canvassers stumbled on tho whole colony of Chinese, who displayed eompletcTiulilferenee; however, their Russian wives wrote them down and promised to see to it that they were taught. A feature of the campaign is the effort to establish courses in as many houses as possible. Thus far there have been difficulties in this connection because of the general shortage of housing space, which makes it difficult to find free rooms for instruction, and because some of the bouse committees show little desire to co-operate. Now instructions have been sent out that wherever a free corner exists in a house, it must be placed at the disposal of the organisations which arc lighting illiteracy. _ The mass enthusiasm of the drive for culture ” is largely concentrated in the cities and towns, in the country districts, where most of the illiteracy is to bo found, it is more difficult to devise means of eliminating it. However, many individual illiterates will doubtless be helped by the present movement, which fits in with tho general State programme of stopping illiteracy at-thc source by providing school facilities for every child within the next few years.