Today, September 8, is International Literacy Day.
For many of us reading this, literacy is so embedded in everyday life that we rarely think about it. We read messages, search for information, fill out forms, sign contracts, learn new skills, apply for jobs, and communicate with people across the world. Reading and writing became part of how we navigate life so long ago that it’s difficult to imagine moving through the world without them.
Yet literacy is still far from universal. According to UNESCO, at least 739 million youth and adults worldwide still lack basic literacy skills, and almost two-thirds of them are women.
That number is big, yes, but for me, it’s also personal.
My father’s mother never learned to read or write.
She was a poor woman living in a world where the opportunities available to her were extremely limited. As an orphan when she was seven, education wasn’t something she had chosen to leave behind. For a woman in her circumstances, there weren’t many options to begin with.
But when she had children of her own, she was adamant that they would receive an education.
People around her disagreed. Her boys didn’t need school, they told her. They needed to learn how to work because if they wanted to eat, they had to work. Education could seem unnecessary when survival itself demanded so much.
She saw something different.
She couldn’t read a book herself, but she understood that education could change lives. She didn’t have studies about social mobility or access to research explaining the economic impact of education. She couldn’t search for statistics or listen to experts discussing how to give children better opportunities.
She just knew she wanted something different for hers.
In her own way, she was a visionary. She saw what nobody around her could see or explain.
And generations later, here I am: her granddaughter, someone who has spent much of her professional life writing. I’ve written articles, emails, websites, technical content, marketing content, and more things than I can probably remember. Words became not only something I learned to use, but part of how I make a living.
I’ve studied at universities. I’ve built a career working with people and companies in different countries. Today, I live in another country by myself.
And I’m writing this article in my second language.
There is a line between her insistence and my life today. It isn’t perfectly straight. There are generations, sacrifices, decisions, privileges, circumstances, and many other people along that line. But it is there.
She couldn’t read. Her granddaughter makes a living partly because she can write.
And this is something I will never take for granted.
Now, we’re learning another kind of literacy
The meaning of literacy has expanded as the world around us has changed. Reading and writing remain foundational, especially when hundreds of millions of people are still excluded from those skills. But technological shifts also require us to develop new ways of understanding and navigating the world.
Right now, many of us are learning another language: AI literacy.
And I don’t think AI literacy means only mastering the perfect prompt or becoming an expert in every new tool. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and whatever comes next will continue changing. Interfaces will change. Models will improve. What feels advanced today may feel ordinary a few years from now.
AI literacy has to go deeper than knowing which buttons to press.
It means understanding what these systems can and cannot do. It means knowing when AI can accelerate our work and when human judgment needs to take over. It means questioning an answer rather than assuming confidence equals accuracy, and thinking seriously about privacy, bias, attribution, and responsibility.
Most importantly, it means learning how to use AI without handing our thinking over to it.
That’s what makes this particular kind of literacy both fascinating and difficult: we’re learning the language while we’re also writing some of its rules.
There is no finished handbook waiting for us. Companies are developing policies. Governments are working through regulation. Schools and universities are deciding what responsible use looks like. Professionals are experimenting with where AI belongs in their work, while creators are navigating questions around originality, ownership, and creative responsibility.
We’re not entering a world where everyone else already knows what they’re doing. We’re learning together while the technology itself keeps changing.
Literacy gives us agency
Maybe that’s the connection I keep coming back to.
The power of literacy has never been limited to recognizing words on a page. Literacy gives people greater agency in the world. It allows us to access information, question it, communicate our ideas, learn independently, and participate in systems and conversations that might otherwise exclude us.
AI literacy can offer a similar kind of agency.
The goal isn’t to turn everyone into an AI expert, just as learning to read doesn’t require everyone to become a novelist. It’s to understand enough to participate: enough to ask better questions, recognize opportunities and risks, challenge what we’re given, and make informed choices about how we want these technologies to fit into our lives and work.
That’s also why AI literacy matters beyond productivity. Yes, AI can help us create faster, research more efficiently, automate parts of our work, and do things that once required skills we didn’t have. But the bigger question is who gets to understand and use these capabilities, and who risks being left outside another major shift in how the world works.
What one generation makes possible for the next
My grandmother couldn’t have imagined the world her granddaughter would eventually live in. She couldn’t have imagined me working through a computer with people thousands of kilometers away, building a career across countries, living independently in another part of the world, and publishing words written in a language that wasn’t the one I grew up speaking.
She certainly couldn’t have imagined me sitting here learning how to work with artificial intelligence.
But I think she would have understood the instinct behind it.
She knew that when the world gives you an opportunity to learn something that can expand your possibilities, you reach for it. And if you have the chance to make that opportunity available to the people who come after you, you fight for that too.
Today, on International Literacy Day, I’m thinking about the woman who never learned to write her own name but refused to let that define what was possible for her children.
She couldn’t cross that particular threshold herself, so she made sure the next generation could.
And decades later, her granddaughter is still walking through doors she helped open.
Now there is another language to learn, another threshold to cross, and another question worth asking: what doors can we help open for the people who come next?