What Pigott presented to the Senate Committee were the assumptions of an emerging new view of under education and illiteracy. The brief was warmly received by one of the members of the committee, Senator David Croll, in whom it had clearly struck a responsive chord:

Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself, I was stimulated by the presentation made here today. I think it is one of the very best that we have had before us...9

That it also influenced the findings of the committee in some small part is indicated in the wording of the Final Report, submitted in June of 1961 to Parliament:

Nothing has impressed the Committee more than the very heavy incidence of unemployment among young people, the unskilled, and the inadequately educated. This has been brought out repeatedly, both by the Committee's own research staff and by other witnesses. Every study that has been made reveals that in the economy of today the emphasis is increasingly on skill and training .... This situation must be viewed with a sense of urgency. Without any question we must devote a much larger proportion of our resources to education and training of all kinds....10

In spite of evidence to contradict the structuralist argument--which showed that in fact it was low aggregate demand due to a depressed world market for Canadian resources that was the main factor in the high unemployment11--the structuralist logic prevailed, and job training and academic upgrading for the unemployed were funded by the federal government in 1960 under the new Technical and Vocational Training Act (MA). The immediate goal, which was particularly politically attractive, was to remove unemployed workers from the labour market into training, but the long term goal was reduction of the rate of unemployment itself. 12

Upgrading

Under the terms of the MA, Job training and academic upgrading were to be established by the provinces at federal government expense. However, in practice, most provinces concentrated on job skill training and did little to implement upgrading, even though there was evidence of a high drop-out rate from job training on the part of those with Inadequate basic education.13 In response, a pilot program In academic upgrading was organized in Elliot Lake, Ontario in late 1963 at the urging of Frontier College, a long-standing adult basic education institution based in Toronto. 14 The program was set up with the joint cooperation of Frontier College, the Ontario Department of Education and the National Employment Service, an arm of the federal government. The aim was to demonstrate that chronically unemployed adults with low educational standing could be helped to adapt to classroom and home study and to make sufficient progress in academic upgrading to be able to successfully move into skill training programs. The organizers believed that for the program to succeed, the teacher must believe in the change potential of participants and be: