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Education Ministry: China's illiterate population down |
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20:07, July 31, 2007 |
Official with the Ministry of Education of China denied the reports that China's illiterate population was increasing. He also outlined the priorities of China's literacy campaign in the future for the prospect of a lower than 2 percent of illiteracy among young and middle-aged population by 2010 and a 50 percent reduction of adult illiteracy by 2015.
Literacy in China is measured by two criteria: the ability to use 1,500 Chinese characters and the answers to five questions about personal education experience. In ethnic minority compounds, the mother tongue is the required language.
At the press release on Monday on July 31 after the opening ceremony of the UNESCO Regional Conference in Support of Global Literacy held in Beijing, Dr. Yang Jin, deputy director-general of Department of Basic Education, Ministry of Education, said that the illiterate population in China was reducing year by year, on the contrary to some media report alleging an annual increase of 26 million.
He explained that the report on the increase was based on the sampling survey in 2005 which involved 1 percent of the total population. Then some experts used the result of that survey to make their estimate of the national illiteracy rate.
"But that practice (of estimation) is a great risk ," Dr. Yang argued, by quoting a UNESCO Institute of Statistics expert who made that comment in talks with Yang the previous day. "That way of forecast, I think, is not appropriate", Yang added.
Yang confirmed the accurate national illiteracy rate would not be known until 2010 when China would conduct its census. The last one was made in 2000. The country has a sampling demographic survey once a year on one-thousandth of the population and a sampling survey once every five years on one percent of the population.
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