National cost of illiteracy incalculable

Putting a national cost on illiteracy seems to be the equivalent of calculating the incalculable. But there's a huge economic and social cost and business, government and society are paying it.

How much is illiteracy costing Canada; Pick a number, any number.

There's the $2-billion-a-year figure foisted on the unwary by literacy advocates who divide 10 into a pie-in-the-sky U.S. estimate of $20 billion.

Or there's the cautious conclusion of a study for the Secretary of State that "under-education (or illiteracy) does have an economic cost." Finally, there's the finding of the Southam Literacy Survey that functional illiterates are twice as likely as literate adults to be long-term unemployed.

While some definite figures exist showing the benefits of literacy to individuals, putting a nationwide cost on illiteracy seems to be the equivalent of calculating the incalculable.

But that's just what the Business Task Force on Literacy figures must be done to spur government action.

"The bean-counters run the world today," says task force president Paul Jones, "and we're not well equipped to talk to them in their terms." Yet some beans have already been counted and numbers crunched in an unpublished Secretary of State study by Ottawa consulting economist Monica Townson and in 40 pages of mind-boggling statistical tables from the Remedial Reading Centre, a private school in Toronto that specializes in helping people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

The centre recorded every cost and each benefit linked to 24 adults with moderate to severe reading and writing problems who received one-to-one tutoring there between 1979 and 1984.

Thirteen were on some form of government assistance, seven were working poor and four were being supported by their families. Two had brain damage, two were physically handicapped and the other 20 had learning disabilities, sometimes with additional physical problems.

Yet of the 23 who could be later traced, only two remained on unemployment insurance; 13 had jobs and the rest were full-time students aiming at specific jobs. Results are even better now, says the centre.

Overall, the Ontario provincial government got back its payments for training in only three-and-a-half years through income and sales taxes from former jobless illiterates now working. The investment by the federal government, though a half-share of the training costs, yields a 25-per-cent annual return to the Gross National Product from the new wages.

"The teaching does pay," insists centre director Abner Steinberg.

"If you put up $20,000 to provide literacy to someone and retrain him, it's a lot less expensive than paying $6,000 a year for the rest of his life." Economist Townson takes a far broader view in her study of the costs of illiteracy. She calculates the extra income that theoretically might be earned if all three million-plus adults with less than Grade 9 schooling wale suddenly being paid the same average wage as work as with some high school education.

The $7.4-billion estimate of lost income "must be treated with extreme caution," Townson warns, since upgrading education won't automatically produce higher income.

That sort of simplistic assumption, in fan, draws Townson's fire when applied to prisoners and welfare recipients who also happen to be illiterate.

Higher literacy would cut the cost of running penitentiaries, notes the 24-page study, only if some illiterate inmates wouldn't be in prison if they were literate—which isn't proven.

And while an Ontario study decides, on slim evidence, that probably half of the province's welfare recipients are illiterate, Townson says the crucial unanswered question is whether they're on welfare because they are illiterate.

"Without a clearer understanding of the linkages between illiteracy and other social problems or concerns, it may well be impossible to arrive at a reasonably accurate estimate of the