Literacy: Nothing Less Will Do

Language. It is an essential instrument of human life, of lives such as ours, that are shaped, directed, enhanced, and made possible by stockpiled past experiences of members of our species. We increase our wisdom, information, and control from one generation to the next with language. We human beings do this. And with language, literacy rears its head…for some.

According to the Conference Board of Canada, an independent research institute, 70 per cent of Canadian companies report literacy problems among workers. The Board also reports only 24 per cent of these firms have developed an organized program to deal with this problem.

A past survey by the Conference Board reported illiterate workers at the Campbell Soup Co. were having problems switching from traditional management style to teamwork systems, problems resulting from workers not being able to read English. According to the report, illiteracy has reached the macro level in the workplace, and has the capability to affect the ability of a company to compete domestically and globally.

Cultural accomplishments down through the ages such as writing, cooking, methods of building, games and amusements, means of transportation, music, and, in fact discoveries of all kinds descend on us as complimentary gifts from  residents of the past. These gifts, none of which we had to earn, give us not only the good chance for a more abundant life than that of our forefathers, but also the chance to add to the sum total of our accomplishments, however small.

Illiteracy’s effects are not limited to problems of filling out forms, or reading a manual or instruction booklet. They go much deeper than that.

Being able to read and write is more than all of that. It is learning to profit by, and, take an active part in the most remarkable of human achievements… the sharing of our experience in the co-operative accumulation of knowledge, however small.

This co-operation must be started in the workplace. As the Conference Board’s report writer, Robert Des Laurier said when speaking of workplace illiteracy: “Extensive co-operation among business, labor, education and government will be required if Canada is to have the quality of work force it will need to compete.” Clearly co-operation is one of the great principles of human life.

We, as individuals live in two worlds of knowledge acquirement. First, it’s a world of happenings around us, those we see first hand. This world is an extremely small world. In this world of personal experience, Hemingway, Conrad, Thoreau, or W.O. Mitchell do not exist because we have never met them. Nor does apartheid, Romanian orphans, the holocaust, a unified Germany, or a democratic Russia exist until we have read about them, or a news writer has provided the copy for a newscast. Call the world of personal experience an extensional world.

Most of our knowledge, wherever it is acquired, is from parents, friends, school, books, newspapers, television, radio or the Internet, and of course, from conversations, all of it is verbal. Most of this knowledge is given by people who reported it: reports of reports of reports, and so on, all the way back to the first-hand reports of someone who saw it happen. Call this world a verbal world.

For the purposes of the exchange of information, and, in order to shape, direct, and enhance our lives, we must be able to make ourselves understood.

Nothing less will do.