Each One Teach One

The proudest village in Mexico last week was tiny Soledad Etla (pop. 1,200) in Oaxaca State. President Manuel Avila Camacho had just given it a handsome new flag. In one year every one of Soledad Etla's 470 illiterates had learned to read & write.

Soledad Etla was Mexico's first 100% literate village, but others were on the way. In Tecuexcomac, 300 villagers get up at 4 every morning to attend reading & writing classes. In El Palmito, like many of his classmates, nine-year-old Schoolboy Jose Rojas hurries off each day after school to teach the two Rs to a 54-year-old day laborer.

All this is part of a whirlwind campaign begun in 1944 by President Avila Camacho and his tireless, able Education Minister Jaime Torres Bodet. They reasoned that Mexico could cure its biggest problem--48% illiteracy*--within a year if "each one taught one." To rope in the illiterates the Department of Irrigation offered free corn to anyone attending its classes. A special stamp issue was put out to help pay for 4,000,000 Government-issued primers. One illiterate old Indian chief solemnly promised Minister Bodet to make the people of his village literate even if he had to kill off the dumb ones.

Less cooperative Mexicans, who didn't want to teach and could afford not to, were allowed to buy their way out by contributing to "literacy centers." By last week 45,000 centers were teaching from 25 to 40 illiterates apiece. By March 1, every Mexican must carry a card showing that he has either learned or taught, or contributed to a center. Illiteracy itself will be a crime.

*Louisiana had 35.7% illiteracy in 1940, highest of any U.S. state; South Carolina had 34.7%, Mississippi 30.2%. But U.S. standards are higher. Mexico calls anyone literate who can read 50 words in two minutes, understand half of what he reads. The U.S. considers any one with less than five years of schooling illiterate.

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