Literacy barrier leaving us shorthanded: expert

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Industrial societies can no longer afford to "discard" those lacking basic literacy skills, says a visiting American educationist whose clients have ranged from blind people to astronauts.

There are not enough people otherwise available to perform the complex jobs of the modern workplace, Dr Thomas Sticht told an adult literacy conference in Auckland yesterday.

Dr Sticht, an experimental psychologist, said many jobs in the past were "engineered" so workers did not need to read.

That had changed, to the point that being able to follow technical manuals was essential throughout industry, even for tasks such as changing the wheel of a car.

"A mechanic who uses a wrench to tighten a wheel and says, 'That feels good to me' should have gone to the manual to use the right torque and get 10,000 more miles out of a tyre," he told the Workbase conference of adult literacy trainers.

"Otherwise, people will say that mechanic doesn't know how to fix cars."

Dr Sticht has spent more than 30 years developing and applying a learning concept called functional context education, in which people are taught to read from the materials of the jobs for which they are training.

His early work was for the US armed forces in the 1960s, when the Pentagon wanted to enlarge its recruitment pool for the Vietnam War and wanted to know if it could use people with literacy levels in the bottom 30 per cent.

Another client was space agency Nasa, which asked him to look into communication problems among astronauts.

He found that military recruits put through job-related literacy programmes made three to five times the progress in job-related reading than those who underwent general literacy training.

Both programmes were for six weeks and achieved an improvement in the general literacy reading age of about seven months.

But the job-related literacy programme produced an average increase of about 25 months in job-related reading ages.

Dr Sticht said the military began accepting 85 per cent of recruits who began with literacy levels in the bottom 30 per cent, whereas they used to be disqualified automatically.

As well as improving productivity in the workplace and boosting self-esteem, investing in adult literacy rubbed off on the children of workers, because their parents started reading to them at home.

"It is another use of our dollars - they become double-duty dollars," he said.

But Dr Sticht was sceptical about a literacy survey of OECD countries in 1997 which found that more than one million adult New Zealanders were not sufficiently literate to cope with everyday life and work.

He said similar statistics were produced for the US and Britain, but the figures had been called into question.

If governments believed there was such an extreme crisis, "money would have been thrown at it".

The real problem was that people did not take adult illiteracy seriously enough.

Deputy Prime Minister Jim Anderton told the conference he was concerned that up to 40 per cent of the workforce suffered some form of literacy dysfunction, an issue which was masked when the country had higher unemployment.

Now that unemployment was the lowest for 13 years, skills shortages in industries such as forestry, boat-building and manufacturing presented a major challenge for business and the Government.

Workbase, a non-profit organisation, has worked with 45 companies to introduce literacy programmes since 1996 and has been allocated $360,000 from Mr Anderton's Ministry of Economic Development budget for five projects in the Hawke's Bay and the Bay of Plenty.