Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Wednesday September 29, 2010

When you can’t read

Constant struggle
        An estimated 40 per cent of Canadians can’t handle written communications with any ease. They’re not illiterate – by international standards, Canada ranks among the world’s most literate nations, with a literacy rate around 99 per cent – but reading, writing, and understanding numbers is hard work for them.
        My granddaughter has just started to read. She sounds each letter, then tries to blend the sounds into a recognizable word. It’s a slow, painstaking effort. Sometimes, by the time she’s figured out the sounds of a word, she’s lost her place on the page.
        Fortunately, she’s excited about reading. Before long, she’ll read so fluently, she won’t remember how she struggled once.
        But for many adults, the struggle is constant. It’s easier to find excuses, to let someone else do the work.
        And as they fail to apply the skills they already have, their facility with words and numbers declines further.

Pushed to the edges
        Don’t assume that people who have trouble reading must be mentally deficient. Montreal Canadiens former coach Jacques Demers, now a Canadian Senator, led his team to a Stanley Cup without being able to read.
        But Demers is clearly an exception – he succeeded in spite of his inability to read. For most people, lack of literacy limits their opportunities. They can’t read about job opportunities; they can’t write a resume or fill out an application; they can’t analyze a contract.
        They can write a cheque, but not balance their chequebook.
        Lacking access to more credible sources, many probably believe Fox News presents unvarnished truth.
        Today is “Raise a Reader” day in many Canadian cities. The day started in 1997 as a newspaper promotion in Vancouver. It wasn’t a totally altruistic gesture — without readers, newspapers would have no future.
        But it’s equally true that without readers, civilization has no future. Even as electronic media proliferate, the word – not the picture — remains our basic means of sharing wisdom.
        Until we develop a means to transmit thoughts directly – a prospect I don’t look forward to – we will need words to communicate those thoughts. More and more, those who have difficulty reading will find themselves marginalized, on the outside looking in at a world they don’t understand.
        The time to start raising readers is right now. So that our children and grandchildren won’t have to depend on excuses to get through life.
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Your Turn



Joan Mistretta offered some mixed reactions to my column last week, in which I mused about the connections we have with the past that we are often not aware of.
        “Your column on time travel was fun,” she wrote.
        Then, quoting me, she added, “Folks who say things like, "…if one went back and changed the course of history, then one would not have been here to be able to go back and change history" are not!”
        Well, you see, I wanted that sentence to sound as circular as the thought it was trying to express, which was, let me see, perhaps, oh well, who cares….

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NEW BOOK NOW AVAILABLE

Five years ago, I swore I would never write another book. It was simply too much work! Then Mike Schwartzentruber, now the President of Wood Lake Publishing, asked me to write a sequel to my earlier “Everyday Parables.” For reasons I explain in the book, I could not say no to Mike.
        The result is “More Everyday Parables,” available now from Wood Lake. The official price is $19.95 Canadian; they’re offering a special introductory web price of $15.96. (I understand there may be an electronic downloadable version coming later.)
        You can read about it, and order it, by clicking here.
        Or you can contact Wood Lake at 9590 Jim Bailey Road, Kelowna, BC, Canada V4V 1R2, telephone 1-800-663-2775.
        My first book of parables consisted mostly of “object lessons,” metaphors relating things of various kinds to insights about God, Jesus, the church, the Christian faith… Jesus told quite a few of that kind of parable, likening the Kingdom to a mustard seed, yeast, a lost coin, etc. But most of his parables were stories. So I decided for this second book of parables to concentrate on stories too, and see how they might spin out into religious insights.
        They’re not just re-tellings of Jesus’ stories, in modern guise. I tried to look for stories that he could not have told, because the circumstances and technologies did not exist in his time. Whether they work or not, only you can tell me.

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