Reading was top of the agenda for students across the Island this week as they celebrated International Literacy Day.

Education Minister El James paid a visit to Purvis Primary School to learn about pupils' progress, while members of Bermuda Reading Association dropped into Devonshire Pre-School to enjoy circle read-aloud time, followed by a reading session at Clara Muhammad School, on Cedar Avenue.

Walia Ming, from the Association, said Thursday was chosen so Bermuda could celebrate International Literacy Day on the same date as Universal Children's Day.

"We believe this is a perfect match for obvious reasons," she said. "The aim of International Literacy Day is to focus attention on the need to promote worldwide literacy.

"It is estimated that 860 million of the world's adults do not know how to read or write — nearly two-thirds of this number are women — and that more than 100 million children lack access to education; hard to believe considering that we are living in the not-so-new millennium.

"No doubt we have a long way to go in the area of literacy. We asked schools to participate by doing something special to celebrate literacy."

The event came two days after the parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Education heard from Bank of Bermuda CEO Philip Butterfield on how literacy and numeracy standards needed to be raised in schools.

Mr. Butterfield, chairman of the interim executive board on education, said the bank was a major funder of the Adult Education Centre and that recently he met a 19-year-old there who could not read.

Describing it as a tragedy, he said: "I could not embrace that reality that this community, with the highest GDP per capita, has a 19-year-old person who is first learning how to read. Everything he knew up until that stage of his life, somebody had to tell him.

"We have improper values in this community and we condone it every day because responsible people are not speaking out."

He said his brother Vincent Hollinsid, Chief Fire Officer, had recently struggled to fill 15 vacancies in the fire service because out of 87 applications, only 21 people passed a basic literacy and numeracy test.

Select committee chairman Neletha Butterfield, herself an educator, said she had come across people older than 19 who could not read. "I have my statistics and that's what people don't want to hear," she said.