Preface

by James MacLatchie
Executive Director,
John Howard Society of Canada

This manual, which is part of a 'package' of a video, a manual and support documents, is the latest contribution of the John Howard Society of Canada to the promotion of literacy awareness.

In 1987, a Southam Survey found that seven out of ten Canadians could not find the amount owing on a tax table. One in two people could not find a store in the Yellow Pages ads. Twenty nine percent could not identify the amount owing on a telephone bill. Thirteen percent could not find the traffic sign they had been asked to circle on a page.

In the spring of 1989, the John Howard Society of Canada set itself the task of asking how such literacy handicaps were affecting the clientele of programs which the society operates from its (approximately) seventy-five branches across Canada.

John Howard Society workers were alarmed to have to conclude that John Howard Society and other community workers are so busy doing our 'real' work, that we do not have an appreciation of how discriminatory we can be towards people with limited literacy skills. We began to recognize as well, that this issue can not be addressed by merely setting up another service program because the problem is that we do not 'see' this handicap, and neither do most of the other institutions in our community. The primary barrier then, turned out to be awareness. Consequently, we produced booklets for community agencies (health, recreation and social welfare to name a few) entitled Taking Down the Wall of Words.