From the onset and from ages past, everyone believed so much in education. Parents would do everything in their capacity to ensure that their children get educated and not illiterates like them.
You would even hear some parents saying "where I didn't get to being educated, my children will go beyond". This is to show how well they're very interested in making their children become great people in life. So LITERACY has been generalized to be about education and everything we learn in the process.
But the question is, does being literate as we've termed it really makes us good people to our family, community or nation as a whole?
We've seen situations of a well educated person behaving like someone who haven't ever smelled being learned and a quack illiterate behaving well like a learned person. Though they may not be able to speak fluently, read or write but they possess so much wisdom and great amazing acts.
Education may be the key to success but it is never the key to having human feelings, empathetic or being wise.
So many literates has ended up wasting years of their literacy journey because their acts goes way behind and far from being regarded as a learned person.
If literacy has been the path to empathy and good attitude then most nations won't be in a mess through the misconducts and heartless acts of the leaders.
If only it's all about literacy, then there won't be cases of corruptions here and there, hiding the incentives meant for the masses at the time they are being ordered to obey a curfew order and masses only have access to the incentives by looting them.
These leaders are well learned and literate but their literacy doesn't warrant them to be good leaders to their citizens.
If literacy was to define a good parent then how do we explain a parent who persistently insist that a child study what they want him/her to study and not what the child wants. Truly, parents are guardians and directors in helping children find their paths in life but when there's a collision in interests or Passion of what they want to do, then there should be an appearance of being learned or knowledgeable by knowing that what you want for the child is not what he/she wants but to support them on the career path they choose not imposing on them.
Many parents wasted the years of their children's lives because they want their children doing what they chose for them of which these children goes ahead to do since they don't want to disobey and then go in pursuit of what they want for themselves later and that's if such child is adamant and not the one that accepts his/her fate unhappily to do what the parent wants to make them happy.
So many illiterates are out there who raised great kids that literates could not raised (though children's way of life is by their choices or decisions but still the parents have a part to play). They have empathy towards their fellow beings, build genuine show of love and lay standards of not being covetous but aspiring for a great future.
Literacy doesn't define a good friend who would prevent betrayal, it doesn't define couples who would chose to be faithful to their vows, a leader choosing to be a servant to serve the nation rightly or citizens who would not want an act of diversity among themselves.
No one is judging anyone and I'm not pointing fingers but just to lay down the fact that being a literate does not make one a good person or empathy enough to be good to follow beings or the country.
It's a different thing to be learned and a different thing entirely to be a good person and of good conduct.
In as much as we are trying well enough to be educated, learned and be referred to as literate, we should also ensure that we build our attitudes towards other people before it extends to the entire world.
It's great have an environment where everyone lives peacefully and not plotting against one another and it's great when we can have that mindset of lifting others not because we want something in return but to make the world a more better place
This is my contribution to the prompt by the Hive Learners community on Literacy for week 174 episode 2.
All pictures are MINE