LITERACY vs literacy: conflict in approach

With the fervor of religious crusaders, literacy advocates champion their own approaches. For some, reading and writing take second place to changing society.

In a pin-neat kitchen at the back of a turquoise-trimmed clapboard house, Charlotte Piercey and Ray Felix discuss Ellen Bell's eggs.

"The eggs are fresh. They are very fresh. Ms. Bell sells many fresh eggs. She sells twelve fresh eggs for seventy cents." Felix reads confidently as Piercey moves her finger along the words. He's 35 and left school after Grade 5 to work in a fish plant. She's the clerk of this town nestled at the foggy end of the Burin Peninsula.

Together they're engaged in literacy.

In a sweltering, untidy room on the top floor of a skid row community centre in Vancouver, Linda Forsythe and 21 others discuss the price of coffee, the exploitation of Indians and the inalienable rights of students.

They're engaged in LITERACY.

"Our job here is empowerment," says Forsythe. "We have to get these people to take charge." In between— geographically and ideologically — at a community centre in Scarborough, Ont., nine volunteer literacy tutors listen with some trepidation as Joy Evans of Frontier College suggests they try both literacy and LITERACY.

"Tutors are not obligated to get involved with their students in terms of advocacy, but the students do have a lot of needs," Evans says.

These three vignettes give a glimpse of the issue which most divides Canada's literacy groups—whether to teach literacy as an end in itself or as a means to other ends. Much of the constant squabbling among literacy groups arises from this fundamental disagreement over purpose.

Evelyn Murialdo calls it the difference between little-l literacy and big-L LITERACY.

Luke Batdorf, president of Laubach Literacy of Canada.

"I relate Literacy as knowing, understanding, living and learning," she says at the Toronto offices of the International Council for Adult Education.

"I don't want to teach literacy to someone, teach them how to read and write, without touching their lives, without picking out with them the things they need to learn in order to have a place in this society. I don't want to do that." Now listen to Luke Batdorf, president of Laubach Literacy of Canada: "They (the big-L advocates) see the illiterate person as an underdog, so of course they're in a hurry. They see literacy only as a tool for social justice or equal rights. I think that's very patronizing."

Batdorf's agitated tone also conveys some of the annoyance that Laubach feels over constant attacks on its teaching materials, such as the story of Ellen Bell's eggs.

"Laubach is so boring," says one literacy with a community project.