By Klaus Rohrich
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
I was toodling through downtown Toronto recently and noticed a bus shelter sign that proclaimed, "Literacy is a right". The sign had the logo of the City of Toronto on it, meaning that likely the city paid to produce and paid again to display the sign. That's an interesting use of the taxpayers' money, given that Toronto constantly cries poor and thousands of families and businesses are moving to the 905 area from Toronto to escape the onerous tax burden.
But I don't wish to get too caught up in the City's fiscal problems, albeit there's enough grist for several columns. I want to take issue with the message that the City-sponsored sign is conveying. As I understand them, in our democracy rights are the legal guarantees that we, the people grant to ourselves to ensure we all know what personal freedoms we are legally entitled to. These include the right to free speech (which is much abridged in our country) and the right to freely associate with whomever we want (so long as the people we associate with are not on the list of proscribed or illegal groups) and the right to worship according to our religious beliefs, etc.
I don't see anywhere in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms the right to literacy. The responsibility to be literate lies with the individual. It means that he or she will apply his or her self to the best of their ability in striving to learn what is offered to them through our educational system.
Now, if the sign proclaiming literacy to be a right wishes to take issue with the educational system, then maybe the sign has a point, as our current educational system leaves a lot to be desired. But somehow I can't imagine that the socialist administration of the City of Toronto would take the various teachers' unions to task for churning out dummies.
The ABC Canada Literacy Foundation issued a very disturbing report dealing with just this issue some two years ago, called the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL). The results were not encouraging. Of the Canadians surveyed aged 16 to 65 the vast majority fell at either below or just at the bare minimum in all four categories included. These were the proficiency in prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy and problem solving.
Prose literacy was the ability to use printed and written information to function in today's society. Document literacy included the knowledge and skill to find and use information such as that contained in job applications, maps, tables and charts. Numeracy was defined as the knowledge required to effectively manage the mathematical challenges of diverse situations, while problem solving involves goal-directed thinking.
The ALL split people into five levels, as defined below:
Level 1:
Persons with very poor skills, where the individual may, for example, be unable to determine the correct amount of medicine to give a child from information printed on the package.
Level 2:
People can only deal with material that is simple, clearly laid out, and in which the tasks involved are not too complex. It denotes a weak level of skill, but more hidden than Level 1. It identifies people who can read but test poorly. They may have developed coping skills to manage everyday literacy demands but their low level of proficiency makes it difficult for them to face novel demands, such as learning new job skills.
Level 3:
The minimum skills level suitable for coping with the demands of everyday life and work in a complex, advanced society. It denotes roughly the skill level required for successful secondary school completion and college entry. Like higher levels, it requires the ability to integrate several sources of information and solve more complex problems.
Levels 4 & 5:
People demonstrate a command of higher-order information-processing skills.
The survey results demonstrated that in the area of problem solving over 2/3 of those surveyed fell within level 1 and 2. In numeracy it was almost 50%. In document literacy it was nearly 43% and in prose literacy it was close to 42%.
Clearly our educational system is failing us, as we spend more per capita to educate our children than most other industrialized countries, yet produce graduates who lack the basic skills to function in society.
If the City of Toronto really believed that literacy is a right, it would do everything in its power to ensure that the educational system is properly meeting the needs of its clients by ensuring no one graduates until they have achieved the skill levels necessary to ensure success in life.
But alas, it would appear that the City is much more interested in mouthing politically correct sounding platitudes than in actually making a difference.
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