The Construction of a Crisis: Literacy in Canada
Keywords:
Adult literacy, Literacy assessment, Educational policy, Social marginalizationAbstract
The Southam Literacy Survey (N=2,389) of 1987 dramatically concluded that 24% of Canadian adults are functionally illiterate. Both in press coverage and in the Survey itself, the literacy “crisis” drew on serious misapprehensions. To understand this misconstrual, we must know how the press decided what would count as unacceptably high illiteracy; how its coverage of the Survey reinforced traditional definitions of marginalization and social burden in Canadian society; how Survey findings, which depict illiteracy on the criteria of education, profession, and reading habits, could be so misinterpreted; and how the form of literacy promoted by the Survey, along with the subsequent unwarranted attack on schools, bodes ill for education.
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