Since 1966, when UNESCO proclaimed it, the International Literacy Day has been celebrated every 8 September to remind the world of the importance of literacy in building fairer, more sustainable societies. This 2026 marks its 60th anniversary. It is celebrated under the theme “Literacy for people, the planet and prosperity”, at a time when 739 million young people and adults still lack basic reading and writing skills. UNESCO does not understand literacy as a technical skill, but as a path to emancipation; learning to read and write in order to take part in social life, make decisions about one’s own life, and transform, together with other people, the conditions of inequality in one’s own community. A concrete example of this is the adult school La Verneda-Sant Martí, in Barcelona, and its influence on education over the last four decades.
Participating in decisions, co-creating knowledge, prioritising those who need it most
La Verneda-Sant Martí was created in 1978 in a building that had been the headquarters of the Sección Femenina of Franco’s regime and was left empty when the dictatorship fell. A group of neighbours from the district occupied it to create the school. It draws on the tradition of the workers’ athenaeums, the Popular Universities and the Pedagogical Missions of the Second Republic, as well as the influence of Paulo Freire’s theory of dialogic action.
Its functioning is based on the participation of the school’s participants (those without university degrees who are training at the school) in decision making: which courses are offered, at what times (the centre is open seven days a week, from 9am to 10pm), and what to demand from the administration. These decisions are made through egalitarian dialogue among participants, educators and collaborators, where contributions are valued for their arguments rather than for the position of power of the person making them. The educational actions that are put into practice are those that participants decide to co-create among those backed by scientific evidence of social impact, the ones that have been shown to achieve the best results in improving learning and in social cohesion in the neighbourhood. Every decision prioritises overcoming the inequality faced by those in the most disadvantaged educational and social situations, for example, migrant people arriving from all continents, while the school also becomes a space of coexistence and learning for everyone in the neighbourhood. It is the participants themselves who decide on their own educational process, without depending on the corporatism of professionals.
This model has been documented in several scientific publications, in journals such as Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record at Columbia University, and the European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, among others.
The encounter with Freire and its transfer to São Paulo
In 1988 Paulo Freire, the most cited pedagogue internationally, travelled to Barcelona for the first time. At La Verneda-Sant Martí School he found a model in which those who speak are the participants themselves, while professionals listen. A year later, as secretary of education of São Paulo, he launched MOVA (Movimento de Alfabetização de Jovens e Adultos), a programme based on the same principle, the alliance between public administration and civil society organisations, and spaces where learners had the floor. The programme is still active today in hundreds of Brazilian municipalities.
From adult literacy to Schools as Learning Communities around the world
Since 1995 this model has been transferred to early childhood, primary and secondary education through the Schools as Learning Communities project, present today in more than 1,000 centres across dozens of countries in Europe and Latin America. Educational actions such as Interactive Groups, Dialogic Literary Gatherings and the educational participation of families (often non literate migrant mothers or women without academic qualifications) are achieving the best results in improving learning for both families and their children, while also improving school coexistence and the social cohesion of communities. There are also dozens of scientific articles documenting the social impact of the Successful Educational Actions implemented in these schools.
Sixty years after the first International Literacy Day, La Verneda-Sant Martí still shows that teaching someone to read and write transforms their life, their family and their community, and that when this model is transferred, as happened between Barcelona and São Paulo, and as happens today across the network of Schools as Learning Communities, it improves thousands of lives and communities around the world.
Associate Professor at the Department of Theory and History of Education, University of Barcelona.