CULTURE-COLOMBIA: Pushing the Reading Habit

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

María Isabel García

BOGOTA, May 2 2001 (IPS) - The 14th International Book Fair of Bogota is under way in the Colombian capital at a time when the country’s habit of reading is at a low, dropping from 3.4 books read annually per person a decade ago to just 2.4 books a year today.

In preparing for this year’s exhibition, the sponsoring institutions promoted a National Survey of Reading Habits and organised discussion panels involving book editors, printers and marketers.

The results of this poll, which covered 20,000 households, indicate there are only 5.8 million readers of books among the 13 million people living in 11 of Colombia’s 32 departmental capitals, including Bogota.

Data on the number of books read, means of access to books, favourite topics and other aspects were gathered as part of the latest household survey conducted by the government’s National Department of Statistics.

The ministries of Education and of Culture, by the Colombian Chamber of Books, the Foundation to Foment Reading (Fundalectura) and the Latin American and Caribbean Regional Centre to Promote Books all provided backing for the survey.

The relative low readership among Colombians stands in stark contrast to the growth of the country’s publishing industry, Latin America’s second largest exporter of books and printed material, after Mexico.

It also contradicts the massive annual attendance of the International Book Fair of Bogota. Organisers estimate this year’s average daily turnout at 27,000 people, similar to last year’s levels.

As far as reading habits, the survey shows that the main reasons respondents gave for not reading more are lack of interest, time or money.

The average annual book consumption (books read, not purchased) in Colombia, 2.4 books per person, is much lower than in Argentina, for example, where the average is 14 books per person per year, and far below the European Union, where the annual average is 20 to 30 books read.

“The root of the problem lies in Colombia’s inadequate educational policy, the false idea that people don’t like to read and the few campaigns to promote reading,” Pilar Lozano, an author of children’s books, told IPS.

Lozano’s latest work “Turbel, el viento que se disfrazó de brisa” (Turbel: The Wind That Disguised Itself as a Breeze) is one of the novelties offered at this year’s Fair by the Panamericana publishing house. She says there is an oversupply of “junk culture,” particularly in Colombia’s urban centres.

As an example of the educational deficiencies and abandonment of rural schools, Lozano cited the case of a teacher in the village of Mesetas. The only books she has available to offer her young students are the Constitution and the Penal Code.

“That teacher’s heart breaks every time three of her students, who love to read, ask her for a storybook to take home. She has nothing to give them,” said the writer, who has also published “Colombia, mi abuelo y yo” (Colombia, My Grandfather and I), a geography-based tale that is in its tenth edition.

Nevertheless, there are some positive signs, Lozano said, pointing to the existence of 150 reading clubs, organised in San Vicente del Caguán by Reina Amparo Restrepo, a member of a community of Catholic nuns.

San Vicente del Caguán is the territorial seat of a 42,000- square-km area in Colombia’s southeast that has been demilitarised in order to pave the way for peace talks between the Andrés Pastrana government and the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The town of Mesetas is also found within that area.

The reading clubs’ libraries operate in people’s homes and in schools, and the groups organise lectures and loan out books to be read at home. Each library last year had 13 titles that had already been read by all members of the clubs, Lozano said.

For his part, Alberto Manguel, an Argentine-born author and naturalised Canadian citizen, commented that the decline in the reading habit among Colombians “coincides with the decision to turn Latin America into the dump for North American cultural garbage.”

“This should come as no surprise, because an immense apparatus has been installed to sell us cultural rubbish,” added the author of “Una historia de la lectura” (A History of Reading), a compilation of information covering 6,000 years of reading in different cultures.

Essayist and professor of communications, Arturo Guerrero, says that one origin of the low levels of book consumption in Colombia lies in the structure of education here.

“Children and youth are victims of the superficiality and lack of methodology of the scientific teaching tradition, which produces students who cannot concentrate or understand what they read,” Guerrero told IPS.

“It is not just a question of a lack of money and time. The contemporary culture of superficiality, spread by the mass media, hurts the ability to concentrate,” he explained.

“Reading is not as easy as watching television. It is not just pressing a button on the remote control, it requires an effort and presumes a certain immersion in personal solitude,” Guerrero added.

Carmen Barvo, executive director of Fundalectura, announced that, through an agreement with the Ministry of Culture, her organisation will re-launch the “Colombia Grows by Reading” campaign this year.

The initiative pushes the mayors of the nation’s 1,069 municipalities to set up public libraries or to update the ones that exist. The programme provides them with support in bibliographic selection, new technologies and training programmes to promote reading among the entire population.

“The pillars for creating readers are the school and the library,” Barvo stressed.

The president of the International Editors Union, Pere Vincens, a special guest at the Bogota Book Fair, which ends May 7, indicated that the low readership in Colombia revealed by the survey is a wake-up call to take urgent action in the fields of education and reading promotion.

“Reading has a direct relationship with the wealth of a country because reading and understanding means that one can better assimilate new technologies, for example,” he said.

This fact has led the Bogota-based University of the Andes, considered one of the best institutions of higher learning in the country, to initiate a reading and writing programme for its students in which they learn everything from how to use a dictionary to writing to reading comprehension.