The Other City...
Where No One Reads...

As a child, she had always had a yearning to enter the other city, the unknown city beyond and within the suburbs, where nobody - middle-class folklore declared - read books or washed or cooked proper meals. She had sometimes, even as a child, wondered if it could be as fearful as its reputation. She disliked being made to feel fear of her fellow men and women. Now she lived with these people and was no longer afraid, for they were like herself. Then she taught one or two illiterates on an illiteracy scheme. Then she started to teach two classes a week at a College of Further Education: aspiring caterers on Day Release. Cambridge visitors, visitors from outer space, childless visitors, asked her how she could bear to teach such stupid, such dull, such unambitious, such ill-read folk. She did not answer that intelligence is relative, like poverty. She did not think her students stupid, just different...

--- Margaret Drabble, The Radiant Way

September, 1987 - headlines across the nation boldly acclaim: FIVE MILLION CANADIANS FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE - "The first real statistics about the state of literacy in our country ," declares Peter Calamai of Southam Inc., sponsor of the nationwide Southam Literacy Survey. ^l

At last , real facts. A lever to use in the fight for funding, in the fight to regulate the poor, unemployment, homelessness, crime and low worker productivity, and to control immigration and education. Illiterates are our problem, 5 million of them. Not as many as the 23 million "illiterates" in the USA, but 24% of our population over 18 years of age. Think of it...staggering... 1 in 4 of us... No...THEM... It's they who can't read or write well enough to function... those illiterates... not us... we need to help them... And that's how it works, the separation of the illiterates from the literates, the "have nots" from the "haves," them from us... all with the "best" of intentions.

Unproblematically accepted as truth, the question is, what to do. National attention is focused on illiteracy as never before. Social task forces, grant priorities, hearings of a Select Committee on Education, special issues of journals, news series, stories and editorials, researchers, educators, business(men), politicians... all are suddenly concerned about the rampant state of illiteracy in Canada. That there are 5 million illiterates has, almost overnight, become a lasting truth. Note a few lines from the Toronto Star editorial of July 18, 1988:

The numbers are staggering: Five million or more Canadians can't read, write or count well enough to be called literate. What's the cost? According to the Business Task Force on Literacy, it's more than $10 billion a year through unemployment, industrial accidents, lost productivity and training costs.

More federal and provincial support is called for to educate the increasing numbers of children of refugees and immigrants being admitted into the country. Take responsibility for your policies, the feds are told. Noteworthy is the implicit racism (unintended, of course) as "the problem" gets shifted from a vast general issue to the specifics of immigrant and refugee policies; further regulation and cutbacks to end this glut of "illiterates" from entering "our" country becomes the subtext.