The social and economic importance of encouraging adults to engage in continuous learning throughout their working lives is undisputed. Better-educated individuals earn higher wages, have greater earnings growth over their lifetimes, and experience less unemployment (Riddell, forthcoming). Better-educated nations have higher long run economic growth and higher standards of living (Davies, 2002). There is also a growing consensus that education system lies at the heart of a nation’s social prosperity as well (Wolfe and Haveman, 2001).
But all too often, lifelong learning simply means those who are already highly educated are getting even more education and training. The most recent Canadian data indicate that individuals with a university degree are five times more likely than individuals with a highschool education or less to participate in adult learning (Myers and Myles, 2005). In fact, the standard conclusion from adult learning studies is that, far from providing an opportunity for ‘second chance’ education, life-long learning is the exemplar par excellence of the ‘rich getting richer’.1
Recent Canadian evidence suggests that this should change. A study by Statistics Canada (Zhang and Palameta, 2006) shows that adult learning has the potential to significantly improve the economic well-being of those with relatively low educational attainment. A second study (Coulombe and Tremblay, 2005) shows that the benefits of upgrading the skills of the least educated members of the workforce extend to the entire nation: a one percent increase in a country’s average score on the international test for adult literacy is associated with an eventual 2.5 percent relative rise in labour productivity and a 1.5 percent rise in GDP per capita. (These effects are claimed to be three times as great as for investment in physical capital.) Most importantly, these authors show that raising literacy and numeracy for people at the bottom of the skills distribution is more important to economic growth than producing more highly skilled graduates.
Although Canada is generally recognized as having a high level of educational attainment, on average, there is considerable scope for improvement. According to the latest Census (2001), 5.8 million Canadians aged 25 years and over had not successfully completed high-school. Among those without a high-school diploma, the literacy skills of Canadians are very poor in comparison to other countries.2 According to the International Survey of Adult Literacy, nine million, or 42 percent of Canadians aged 16 to 65 years have literacy skills below the level considered as necessary to live and work in today’s society (Riddell, 2004).
1 Numerous studies have shown that the more initial
education an individual has, the more likely they are to participate in learning
later in life (de Broucker, 1997; OECD, 1999; OECD, 2003a; Peters, 2004).
2 An OECD and Statistics Canada report (2000) shows that literacy
scores of Canadians without a high-school diploma are lower than similarly educated
individuals in a number of countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia,
Germany, Sweden, Finland, and Demark, but higher than similarly educated individuals
in the United States.