The world engages in improving the literacy of reading and writing, but it is not that important now. What is text/written language anyway? It's an ancient Information Technology for storing and retrieving information. We store information by writing it, and we retrieve it by reading it. Six thousand to 10,000 years ago, many of our ancestors' hunter-gatherer societies settled on the land and began what's known as the agricultural revolution. That new land settlement led to private property and increased production and trade of goods, generating a huge new influx of information. Unable to keep all this information in their memories, our ancestors created systems of written records that evolved over millennia into today's written language.

But this ancient information technology is already becoming obsolete. Text has run its historic course and is now rapidly getting replaced in every area of our lives by the ever-increasing array of emerging Information Technology driven by voice, video, and body movement rather than the written word.

In my view, this is a positive step forward in the evolution of human technology, and it carries great potential for a total positive redesign of education. Alphabetic writing, in which, broadly, consonant and vowel sounds are indicated by letters in sequence, is the most widespread system in use today, and it is the means by which literacy will be disseminated, but it is not the only system, nor is it the earliest.