Chapter 1
An Overview of the State of Literacy Work

I
What can the statistics tell us about restricted literacy?

The numbers question continually comes up, when advocates make the case for literacy in public presentations, or talk with the media, or deal with governments. Many literacy practitioners are skeptical about literacy statistics, because the statistics do not seem to measure what literacy programs actually deal with. Furthermore, many programs have more potential students than spaces available, and asking how many more doesn't immediately solve the problem. Nevertheless, practitioners and advocates should know how to use the numbers as sensibly as possible, and to be clear about their limitations. This section looks first at what the statistics on literacy can tell us; then at what they do not and can not tell us.

Creating literacy statistics

In looking at the scope of the problem, media reports, government publications, and scholarly studies have usually seen the task as one of counting illiterates. Usually illiterates are taken to come in two kinds — illiterates or "basic illiterates," and "functional illiterates."

Creating literacy statistics usually involves either a proxy index for literacy, or a direct test. (Several decades ago, however, census questions did include a self-assessment of literacy). It has long been a convention to use census data on the highest level of schooling attained as a proxy measure of basic illiteracy (0-4 years of schooling) and functional illiteracy (5-8 years of schooling). Thus using 1986 census data it is said that 3% of Canadians 15 years and older are illiterate (have attained fewer than 5 years of schooling), and that 17%, or 3.4 million, are functionally illiterate (have attained fewer than 9 years of schooling).

This convention assumes that five years of schooling are necessary and sufficient to enable people to gain and retain basic literacy skills, and that nine years are necessary and sufficient to enable people to develop skills of sufficient variety and complexity to deal with the pervasive forms of print in society. In general, schooling levels are associated with literacy skills. However, for some individuals, these designated levels of schooling are not necessary for literacy, and for other individuals they are not sufficient. Elementary school curricula and assessments are not standard over time and across localities, and different individuals learn differently during any given number of years in school, so that one person's grade four or nine is not the same as another's. Some people have many opportunities to use literacy outside of school, and so develop their skills; others have few opportunities, and their skills atrophy.