What is the literacy issue? Why should we care?

In the Spring of 2013, I was hired to lead a national charitable organization called ABC Life Literacy Canada (ABC). ABC is dedicated to raising the levels of literacy proficiency of adult Canadians. ABC also raises awareness about this challenge and how to meet it.

So, as the former Chair of the Toronto Public Library Board, the daughter of a teacher and of a librarian, I came into the job thinking I knew a thing or two about adult literacy.

Well, I was mistaken. I thought that I would be leading an organization dealing with “pockets” of illiteracy in far flung places in Canada.

You can imagine my shock, on September 13, 2013, when ABC hosted the release of the latest OECD report on the state of adult literacy levels to learn that in every province and two of the three territories, more than 40% -- forty per cent!! -- of the adult population did not function at the literacy level that is necessary to navigate in the information economy.

“This is not possible,” I thought. “This cannot be true. I would know this.” I was correct that there is only a tiny percentage of people who could not read and write at all (less than 2%). “But what is with this 40% figure?”, I thought.

So, I spent the next year and a half digging deep, talking to everyone who is anyone in the world of adult literacy in Canada, and others abroad, to test this “crazy” notion. And I played with the data. I asked questions of the folk in Paris who had undertaken the survey on behalf of 22 OECD countries that participated.

And this was all confirmed when I spoke to Canadian government officials, who had been tracking the date for 30 years. The OECD study involved in-person 1½ hour interviews conducted by Statistics Canada with 25,000 residents across Canada: the largest single survey ever undertaken on this subject in this country. The federal officials were not surprised by the data, which was shocking to me: how could we not know this as a country

Grudgingly, I came to understand that we are facing a very 21st Century phenomenon: the literacy levels we all need to do our jobs, to manage our finances, to interpret medical instructions, to purchase insurance, to read contracts, to book our holiday, in short, to decode information and make good judgements about our daily life, have been steadily rising. And we’re not keeping up.

The information economy we all live in requires that we constantly practice our literacy skills, throughout our lives. Clearly, 60% of us can and do, given their life circumstances. But for the many who don’t, their decreasing proficiency just doesn’t cut it in the 21st knowledge age. Their lives are constantly challenging.