Today, April 9, there will be an attempt at the world’s largest lesson. The UN’s Literacy Decade has just begun and today they want people all over the world to teach a lesson about literacy, which focuses on facts such as that nearly a billion adults are illiterate, most non-literate people are women, and 100 million children don’t even go to school. They hope to have thousands of students thinking about these issues all on the same day. The idea of record setting seems a little silly, but the campaign for global literacy is very serious, addressing a problem that stands in the way of solving almost any problem one can name, whether that’s about healthcare, the environment, economic development, social welfare, or conflict resolution.