Frontier College: Tackling Canada's Quiet Crisis
Any parent would be proud to have their child bring home a report card that included an A+ in reading and writing. But what would they think, if after signing off on that stellar mark, they found their child hiding under the bed and struggling to sound out a sentence that kids years younger would have no trouble reading? I'm not a parent yet, but I would be furious. My anger wouldn't be directed at my child but at the school, at the teacher and at myself? How could there be such a disconnect between the report card and reality?
As I learned during a recent visit to Frontier College, the sad fact is that Canada's report card on literacy doesn't at all match the reality. A surprising 42 percent of adults between the age of 16 and 65 (i.e., the labor pool) does not possess the minimum literacy skills for coping with everyday life and work. I think many Canadians would join me, a newcomer to Canada, in expressing disbelief. How is it that one of the most advanced nations in the world could suffer from such low literacy rates?
Many of my compatriots south of the border tend to idealize Canada as a more equitable social democracy. Officially, Canada's literacy rate is 99 percent of the population over 15. On the United Nation's Human Development Index, Canada ranks 6th, ahead of Japan, the United States and Switzerland. These impressive scores bolster the impression of Canada as a progressive haven.
The devil is in the details, I suppose, or in this case, in the statistics. An indicator is only as useful as its definition. Comparing indicators only makes sense if we know that we are comparing apples to apples. Clearly, Statistics Canada uses a low threshold for measuring the ability to read and write. The figure given to me by Frontier College comes from the International Adult Literacy Survey, which decomposes "literacy" into five levels. The first two levels, which comprise the 42 percent, represent a very low level of functional literacy. Clearly, only knowing one's ABCs isn't enough for most contemporary jobs or even for day-to-day tasks that the rest of us take for granted, like writing a check or finding a doctor's office. (To the credit of Statistics Canada, all of this information is freely available on their website, and they are evidently tracking literacy trends with concern.)
Identifying an issue like low literacy rates and advancing it onto the political agenda are two very different problems. Frontier College Executive Director Cathy Mann posits that one reason for this "quiet crisis" is the stigma attached to being illiterate. The people who suffer most from this problem are unlikely to speak up for fear of being identified as illiterate. And if they don't speak for themselves, who will speak for them? In many cases, even their own loved ones are unaware of the problem. And so the problem continues unrecognized. Compound upon this silence the facts that illiteracy and poverty are positively correlated and that being illiterate makes political participation such as voting difficult, then it is easy to see just how politically and socially disenfranchised many people with literacy problems are.
Organizations like Frontier College continue to provide services for Canadians with literacy problems. Thus, they try to address the problem one person at a time. But no one organization can singlehandedly solve a problem that affects 9 million Canadians. This issue should be elevated to the level of national crisis, like global climate change and terrorism.
As an American in Canada, I'm aghast that such a supposedly progressive country could allow this problem to continue unheeded. From my own experience working in international development, I know that literacy is tied to economic development. It's also an important social equalizer that helps ensure the stability of democratic institutions. In a globalized economy, advanced countries need to be moving farther along the curve in terms of skills development to maintain their competitive advantage.
Is Canada slipping behind? Between 1992 and 2000, it held the top spot in the Human Development Index. It seems to have been dropping ever since. I'm not one for gloom and doom, so I'll give the Canucks the benefit of the doubt. Surely they will get their act together. Surely they won't go the way of my native land, spurning social equity in the name of ideology or political expedience.
In the meantime, it's nice to know that there are groups like Frontier College giving voice to the voiceless and helping them make the grade for real.
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