I am alarmed by this splurge of concern. Not because I'm against the provision of more educational programs - they are needed - but because of the way "marginal" people become scapegoats for big money interests. Business says the costs are $10 billion; "illiterates" are posed as a threat to our national interests. So Peter Calamai quotes McGill University professor Jon Bradley who, speaking of illiteracy, explains:

It's not as life-threatening as AIDS, nor as terrible as mass murder, nor as current as acid rain, but in the long run it could be afar more damaging threat to Canadian society.

The dangers are stark: 10 per cent of Canadian adults can't understand the dosage directions on a medicine bottle; 20 per cent can't correctly select a fact from a simple newspaper article; 40 per cent can't figure out the tip on a lunch bill; more than 50 per cent have serious troubles using bus schedules; and nearly 60 per cent misinterpret the key section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (p.8)

We are in the process of creating an OTHER - the disadvantaged - the illiterate - of unprecedented proportion... "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." What may have been middle-class folklore is now national ideology; that ideology depends upon experts probing that the poor are incompetent, and that is why they are poor. Without literacy, they are "stalled on a long road to oblivion" (p. 40). It's sad, tragic, but "true." Here are the opening lines of the Southam Report:

Five million adult Canadians are marching against their will in an army of illiterates. But they are an army in numbers only. They have no leaders, no power, little support, few weapons and no idea where they are headed. Darkness and hopelessness are usually their banners. (p. 7)

Worst of all, they won't admit they have a problem.
According to Bill Shallow, an adult educator quoted in the Report:

It's something like being an alcoholic. You have to get someone to admit to themselves that they can't read, that they need outside help and that outside help will make a difference. (p.12)

I find these analogies horrendous, wiping out deeply structured personal realities. I find them particularly horrendous in the case of women, who are anything but addicted to being illiterate. Quite the contrary. Their longing for literacy, for education is strong, but squelched by the structure of their lives, a structure which leaves them highly dependent upon support from the men with whom they are in relationship. The national ideology of illiteracy currently being constructed obliterates their contradictory experiences of literacy and objectifies them as : "Other," lacking the competence to do even the simplest things. Furthermore, the judgment of "illiteracy" rests upon a very suspect process of testing.

In order to determine functional illiteracy, twenty-five "representative" Canadians were selected to act as a jury.² From among 38 items on the Southam test, they were asked to indicate the 10 items that "ordinary adults should be able to answer correctly just to get by in today's society." (p.13) Anyone tested who missed 3 or more items is counted as illiterate. While the test as a whole consists of more items (items were adapted from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a functional literacy measure used in the USA, replete with problems), in actuality, illiteracy is determined by performance on the 10 items selected by the jury. To be literate, one must answer 8 out of 10 correctly. The assumption underlying the survey is that someone has to be able to read an item in order to perform the task (i.e., if they can't read the cough syrup instruction, they don't know how much to take; if they read it, they take the correct amount). It's not experience, but reading that counts; one must be able to read in the dominant language without help; most significantly, reading means "proper" functioning. (I never read cough syrup directions; my mother taught me to take no more than 2 teaspoons every 4 hours; as an adult, I take what I feel I need). Literacy determines "competence." The meaning is in the words; it is not, as many theoreticians would argue, derived from context, subtext, the "spaces between the words," history or experiences. As Linda Brodkey notes: