CHAPTER 2

THE LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE ON ILLITERACY

Unemployment, Poverty and Adult Education

In a 1972 article on adult basic education in Canada, Michael Clague observed that:

Ostensibly the 'ABE target group' is made up of individuals who lack the education and skills necessary to compete successfully in the labour market. Indeed this is probably the most widespread assumption about both the group to be served and the purpose of ABE: upgrading for the disadvantaged to improve their employment situation 1

This perspective, which sees illiteracy as a primary cause of poverty and unemployment, and correspondingly, sees adult basic education as a particularly effective anti-poverty strategy, is still the dominant one in 1982, ten years after Clague made this comment. It continues to provide the key assumptions of thought and practice in the sphere of adult literacy and basic education in Canada. When we examine the history of this perspective, we find that adult educators played a significant role in its formulation and dissemination in the 1960's and early 1970's.

Early History

In 1960, the problem of illiteracy was so poorly understood and so little discussed that, according to adult 'educator J.R. Kidd:

when a questionnaire came from UNESCO to Ottawa requesting information about illiteracy in Canada, it was quickly returned to Paris with a short letter stating that the questions did not apply here 2

However, in the context of deteriorating economic conditions, the problem was soon brought to wide attention.

In the period of the late 1950's, Canada suffered from the highest unemployment rate of any Western industrialized nation, a condition which was having destructive social and political consequences for political elites, not the least of which was the increasing erosion of public confidence in the ability of both Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies, and the Ottawa government which espoused them, to maintain the more or less steady growth which had characterized the Canadian economy since the end of World War II. 3 At this time, an influential minority of labour economists argued that this, unemployment could not be explained, as was traditionally done, by reference to a deficiency in the level of aggregate demand in the economy. Instead, they said, it was due to a mismatch between the education and skills of the workforce and the ones required by the existing job openings--leading to the condition known as "structural" unemployment. As part of their evidence, they pointed to the low average education level of the Canadian work force relative to other Western countries. 4