Gary North

July 7, 2008

My knowledge of Canada is greater than most Americans' knowledge of Canada. For six months, I lived south of the Canadian border about 5 miles. I would actually go up and visit British Columbia every couple of months. Also, for over 40 years I have read the works of Stephen Leacock. So, as Americans go, this makes me an expert on Canada.

A Canadian friend of mine who spends about half of the year in the United States sent me a link recently. It went to an article about literacy in New Brunswick. The statistics are simply incredible. Residents of New Brunswick are apparently as illiterate as residents in the United States. This came as a shock.

About half of the adults in New Brunswick have low literacy skills. They cannot read well enough to get a new job. Among seniors, about 83% do not have sufficient literacy to master new skills.

The report indicates that over the next 25 years, it is going to get even worse as the baby boomer population enters senior citizen status.

Literacy is not just the ability to read words. What is missing is the ability to understand the words well enought to follow directions.

The problem is not limited to people who live in New Brunswick. Approximately the same percentage of Canadians in general, 48%, have low literacy skills.

The people who wrote the report say that it is likely the Canadian jobs will move to India or other regions of the world that speak English, where workers are willing to work for a fraction of what Canadians insist they should be paid.

According to the report, the problem begins very early in the public school system. What this means is that the problem of poor education is not limited to the United States. It is a problem throughout all of North America.

Americans do not think of Canadians as suffering from the same defects in their schools that we find in our schools. We tend to blame the failure on poverty in the inner city. There is no question that inner city schools produce poorly educated graduates. But what seems to be the real factor here is not the racial or economic composition of the student body, but rather the failure of the tax-funded educational programs that are used in both countries.

This will reinforce economic inequality. The free market pays people what they are worth. That is, it pays people what consumers that determine workers should be paid. Over time, businesses gain greater skills in identifying exactly what the value of each workers' output is. As this process continues, poorly educated workers who do not perform well will find that their careers hit dead ends very early. Productive people will rise and be rewarded accordingly. People with poor educations and minimal skills will not.

There is not much that government legislation can do to reverse this. Given the fact the government legislation has created the school systems in the first place, government is the problem, not the solution.

Here is the link to the article.

I found it interesting that the original publisher of the article now charges readers to download it. Newspapers around the country are attempting this strategy. It is utterly futile. All you have to do to beat it is to extract seven or eight consecutive words as a block, put this in the Google search engine with quotation marks around it, and click the search button. In less than a second, you will have links to several publications that have reprinted the article verbatim.

Why newspapers think anyone is going to pay them to download an article is a mystery to me. Copyright cannot be enforced in the digital age except through high-powered lawyers. Even then, it doesn't work. It is illegal for teenagers to share music files with each other. A few thousand teenagers have been prosecuted. The practice goes on today as widely as it did before the lawyers got into the act.

It is a sign that publishers of newspapers are digitally so far out of the loop that they cannot make rational decisions. If they cannot get people to read articles, and then read advertisements, and they might as well go out of business. The future does not lie ahead for anyone who charges money for an individual newspaper article.