I have ignored many pieces of advice throughout my life. However, I believe that one of the most important observations I have ever encountered relates to a book called Ethnology for Wanderers, written by Samuel Hurtado, a Spanish professor who taught me ethnology at university. In that book, the professor claimed that we Venezuelans were a culture of illiteracy (that is, we had a profound functional illiteracy that prevented us from understanding complex texts). Honestly, when I read this, I felt deeply offended, since I had always had a reading culture with more than 4,000 books to my credit.
The professor was not bothered when I pointed out to him that it was not true that all Venezuelans were a culture of illiteracy. In fact, he was excited that someone was paying attention to his book, even if it was to criticize it, because apart from his students who had to buy and read it to write an essay for the semester, almost no one bought it.
However, over time I understood that the professor was not wrong in his diagnosis. I was the only one in the class who actually read the book and paid attention to what it said, while the rest of my classmates either skimmed through it superficially or did not read it at all, busy texting on their cell phones in the middle of class.
And what is worse, the professor had seen in the 2000s something that would become a growing trend in my native country: the quality of education (along with basic services, social security, and the economy) was in decline. And that, which he only mentioned in passing in the book about my people, became one of the problems that would aggravate every crisis we have had in the last 27 years.
The problem of functional illiteracy, which may seem like a superficial problem when compared to poverty or lack of medical care, is more important than it appears, because when large-scale crises occur, it makes it difficult for the population to make structural analyses that allow them to overcome them.
When people become accustomed to micro-reading tweets or text messages and stop reading longer texts, they lose their ability to make complex analyses. When engineers and architects graduate poorly prepared from university, their buildings collapse after a flood or earthquake. When people who are not intellectually or morally qualified to run a nation manage finances, it goes bankrupt.
A good education is the fundamental foundation upon which a society can overcome the obstacles that stand in its way. While a poor education is the foundation that leads us to collapse. And now, more than a decade and a half later, I must acknowledge that, apart from exceptional cases like mine or that of some academics, we are not only a culture of illiteracy, but we are also governed by ignorant, incompetent, and corrupt people, who benefit from spreading ignorance so that we cannot efficiently resist their tyranny.
