What the statistics leave out

Although the statistics have their uses, and although measurements are becoming more adequate, the statistics only begin to display the realities that literacy programs work with. People's actual lives and needs are more complex than statistics can suggest. Literacy statistics are, so to speak, merely "facts" — that is, they enable us to define a problem, or to keep track of progress, administratively. But they do not tell us what is actually happening in people's lives.

Not only do the literacy statistics barely begin to describe the realities of people's lives, they also give a systematically selective version of literacy skill as "functional literacy." This selectiveness usually exists more in functional literacy tests than in definitions. Definitions of functional literacy are sometimes very broad. Most definitions trace their lineage back to a Unesco convention to define as functionally literate one "who can engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his group and community and also for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing, and calculation for his own and the community's development." The Southam survey used a definition of literacy as "Using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential." Provincial government policy documents often define literacy informally, emphasizing self-defined needs. For example, Saskatchewan has adopted a definition of literacy as "the ability to read and write in order to improve one's living and working conditions."

The selection of test items is never as broad as such definitions. Test items are almost always tasks that are created where government, corporations and other institutions deal with the public through print and forms. These tasks involve written advertising and information, and bureaucratic record-keeping, regulations and procedures. They bring individual actions, and the "facts" about individual's lives, under government and corporate information and control. Functional literacy tasks are thus matters of what could be called "institutional inscription."

Other forms of literacy do not count in these tests. Two forms of literacy that are left out deserve particular attention. One involves people simply reading and writing stories of their lives — for its own sake, not on behalf of some institutional process. Skill at such reading and writing is ignored in tests. A second form of literacy left out of the usual statistics is "public discourse" —accounts of the society we have, and social, political and legal argument about the kind of society we ought to have — a necessary form of literacy if people are to relate their life conditions to the organization of society. In the Southam survey, over half of people had difficulty paraphrasing a newspaper editorial, or getting the precise legal significance of a statement from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But this did not figure in Southam's calculation of literacy rates. And there are only two such items (questions about a newspaper article on Canada's aging population) in the Statistics Canada survey.