Literacy Rates and Developing Countries

You seem to have lost your plot you said poverty is cured by gender equality. I said gender equality can not exist until a society is modern enough to have time for education.

It doesn't matter how many "vast and reputable organizations" address poverty unless you can show one that goes into subsistence living communities and mandates gender equality as a method of solving poverty you are the one with out an argument.

I agree that gender equality would help in the middle east but really I have seen nothing that shows it as the cause of better standards of living and not a symptom. As those cultures modernize they will be forced to embrace equal education and other gender issues or the culture will stagnate.

What I showed was that people can not define poverty and vast and reputable organizations can not agree on how to compare poverty even in this country alone forget about globally and that other researchers are looking at the correlations in many countries between development level and gender equality as a result of development not as the cause.

Even in the US and UK development happened first then gender and race issues became possible. Now its on you to show me one example that goes the other direction.

Grameen bank loaning money to women in a country like India where women are often still treated like property is an example of how gender equality can be promoted in poor countries and can address destitute poverty. Other organizations provide micro loans online and allow individuals to pick and choose who they loan money to. These are but a few examples of how greater gender equality is already being promoted in extremely poor countries and how improved communications allows this occur. If you were expecting some sort of miracle transformation overnight I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the real issue here is dealing with destitute poverty and supporting the right of women to earn a living.

Still more examples of working on gender equality AFTER a certain standard of living has been achieved.

I agree that gender rights are very important and that they help bring women out of poverty but they still are irrelevant until a certain standard of living is achieved. Giving a women a loan who needs to gather food and water for 16 hours a day just to survive is not going to help a society.

Look at all the examples you give they are all clearly in places where running water and electricity is prevalent and literacy is established. This thread is about those truly with out any modern amenities that facility education by freeing time in day to day life.

India has a very large "poor" population and those loans are doing some good things from what I see on wiki, but those loans would not be possible with out the advances already made in India as a whole that is my point. Gender issues come second they always have and always will.

I mean the plan isn't Ideal but neither is an illiterate population. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Camera on your device snaps a picture of the text on a menu/billboard/receipt/shipping label/product packaging/other document and a text recognition software renders the text that is then converted to speech.

Or a barcode system of similar type could work. Perfect.

Personally, I find this as disturbing as youth no longer needing to learn simple arithmetic because their smart phone has a calculator built into it.

Objectively, people survived reasonably well for eons with no written language. They just put the words into song and dance to make it easier for them to remember them.

Is it conceivable that technology could turn issues such as math/language literacy into a transition phase that humans passed through?

(Probably not, since someone has to learn the things that keep the technology running, but I guess the percentage of the population required to know those sorts of things could be drastically reduced.)

I read somewhere that archaeologists found a cuneiform tablet dated to about a hundred years after the invention of writing. On it the author complained that writing was ruining their children who no longer bothered to memorize everything. Like science itself mathematics, writing, etc. are all just tools for collecting and collating data. The issue is and has always been about learning how to use the tools effectively and, as the Buddhists like to say, not to confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself.

There is no rule which states that there have to be high literacy rates in a population for it to be successful, but there is a strong correlation between the two. I think "speech to text" technology could help develop a nation in order that the next generation of that nation wouldn't have to be stuck in poverty. Consequently, I think it could give those people the chance to even worry about the way its students are learning arithmetic.

I think because of the cost of an education system circumventing literacy rates for a few generations in developing nations could do those developing countries some good.

Intriguing, could you provide me a link for that tablet thing I would very much like to quote an article about it.

Like I said it's just something I read somewhere and if I had a reference I'd provide it. However the idea that the older generation often views the younger as lazy or stupid because they no longer value things like how to use a slide rule or work equations in their heads isn't exactly a new phenomenon and I'm sure you can find plenty of other examples. For example, Plato complained about the invention of writing ruining the minds of the young as well. Personally I'm a bit intimidated by what young people can do with cellphones these days.