Burn, baby, burn
Health care, post-secondary education, French immersion – you name it, and Shawn Graham’s Liberals have almost willingly embraced one broiling controversy after another in recent months. Kelly Lamrock’s tagline, “I will not back down”, now serves a political culture that’s either too passionate or too stubborn to consider any policy options except the most incendiary ones.
What, then, shall we expect from the Education Minister’s involvement in a national literacy conference in Fredericton this week? Will he redeem himself to the chattering classes who expect change in New Brunswick, but not at any price? Or will he, once again, burn himself in effigy to the bemusement of the province’s silent majority?
It doesn’t take much to politicize an issue, especially one as touchy as public education. But is literacy immune to such rank defilement? After all, everyone understands the benefits of reading and writing. Everyone agrees that the alternative is insupportable. And everyone knows that New Brunswick brings up the rear in national testing. (Statistics Canada indicates that 60 per cent of people in the province over the age of 16 are functionally illiterate, compared with 47 per cent in the country as a whole).
As far back as 1988, a study by the Canadian Business Task Force on Literacy estimated the annual cost to business of illiteracy in the workforce at $4 billion, and the cost to society at $10 billion. Commenting on this report, the 2001 edition of the Annual Review of Adult Learning and Literacy, stated: “The [task force] hypothesized that many errors required work to be redone and that many accidents in the workplace resulting in loss of life or property could be attributable to illiteracy.”
Other more recent studies cite “costs due to lost productivity, excessive supervisory time, poor product quality, difficulties in training illiterate workers or problems related to employee morale” and “costs related to loss of consumption in the marketplace because people cannot understand or gain access to information about a company’s products.”
Still, just because the costs of illiteracy are overwhelmingly conceded, it doesn’t necessarily follow that so, too, are the remedies.
There is, for example, a school of thought that insists public dollars are better spent on early childhood education (ECE). Get the kids when they are young and impressionable, the argument goes. Forget about the adults who are either unwilling or incapable of acquiring written language skills.
“In an economy still dominated by natural resources, where 50 per cent of the population lives and works in rural areas, many functionally illiterate adults have been able to get by, even to build secure and prosperous lives,” asserts a recent Saint John Telegraph-Journal editorial. “If experience hasn’t taught them the value of reading and writing, what hope does government have of changing the situation through voluntary programs?”
It’s certainly a point, albeit a blunt one. Others counter that the success of ECE programs depends, at least to some extent, on the quality of a home’s so-called “learning environment.” They refer to studies which conclude that a child’s acquisition of reading and writing skills accelerates in direct proportion to the amount of support and tutelage he or she receives from mom and dad.
That’s hard to guarantee when the parents in question have difficulty parsing the cooking instructions on a can of soup. It’s harder still in families that display a generational ambivalence to “story time”, or any other time beyond the morbid influence of the boob tube.
So, what’s the priority? Look after the kids, or their parents? Build an educated workforce for the future at the expense of an aging, illiterate one now? Divert money for adult literacy programs to a new and vigorous ECE system to compensate for the decline in home-based learning? Or is there some, yet-to-be articulated method for achieving better literacy scores across all demographic groups without breaking the bank?
Mr. Lamrock, you may want to sit this one out, at least until all the experts have had their say.
Unless, of course, you really do enjoy the smell of your own burnt flesh.
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April 14th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Actually, less than 1% of Canadians are illiterate. The higher numbers are for those defined as having “low literacy”. It is a standard communication method used by literacy groups to get more funding. I’m not against higher levels of literacy (as you probably know), I just want an informed debate.
We also have to consider how the world is changing. We are not an oral society and it is no longer necessary to memorize hundreds of lines of poetry or recount Norse sagas. Currently, we are in a similar situation as when the written word replaced the spoken word (ancient Greece) or when the printed word replaced the written word (the Reformation & Enlightenment). Each of these technologies changed the way that society valued and understood knowledge.
Our children live in a “ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate” electronic surround (Mark Federman), and linear literacy skills may not be enough to succeed.
BTW – there is some weird HTML appearing below your header on this page (I’m using Firefox).
April 15th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Interesting comments, Harold. I though the stat seemed exceptionally high. I think I’ll edit the post accordingly (so as not to disseminate misleading information). I don’t know what’s going on with the HTML. (I’ve also lost search functions). I’m looking into it.
Alec
April 16th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Yes, the blog has been acting weird lately. As for the debate, in NB there is also the particular problem of WHICH language a person can read or write. But to take off on Harold’s point, say I love videos, I look at videos and then want to start making them. You can do all this, and even get a career in it, without knowing how to read a single word.
The problem in NB partly seems to be what nobody wants to mention, and thats when you have a blue collar economy, the LAST thing you want is educated people. Nobody wants to admit that even if business wants truck drivers and construction workers, it couldn’t possibly be possible that even though the government says its educational institutions need to be able to support the relevant industries, its can’t be possible that they wouldn’t WANT to address this issue is it?
I’d suggest that’s exactly the situation, but that’s just opinion. However, how many literacy plans has the government actually tried? Hell, you could at least say ‘if you learn to read this much this year you get in a draw to win 10 grand!’. It could at least say, ‘admit you can’t read and sign up for a program and we’ll knock 10% off your provincial tax’. In a rural area, how about ‘we’ll double your odds of getting chosen in the moose lottery’. I mean, there really is NOTHING that makes you think government even cares. In Sweden, literacy instructors are paid teachers who teach adults how to read. In NB,they rely on the meagerly funded volunteers at laubach literacy.
But against Harold’s point, we are FAR more an oral society than before, although also a visual one. We don’t need to learn poetry, but far less inclined to spend an evening reading. Now EVERYTHING is audio, that’s how communication is made now, which backs up the point that we don’t need reading as much as before-but certainly doesn’t discount it. In a recent study it was found that illiterate truck drivers were ten times more likely to travel without doing their safety checks, whether thats because reading is involved or they’re just lazy I can’t remember. But to repeat my last post, NB funds education the lowest of ANY atlantic province, and so I’d suggest that’s good for all of canada. There is simply no way you can look at education spending, the educational institutions (no medical school, no vet school, no architecture school, no film school, and on and on), and think that the government in any way takes this seriously.