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His Excellency John Ralston Saul
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First of all, I am very happy to be a member of the committee that is helping to organize the International Forum on Canadian Children's Literature.
It is exciting and it is very important! I hope it will be enjoyable because, if reading is not sad or amusing, it is boring.
Let me start with two or three depressing facts. Depending on how you balance the accounts, and to whom you are speaking, roughly 25 to 37.5 percent of Canadians are, in one way or another, illiterate. Each time we hear these figures, they are different and are described differently. To be illiterate is not a clearly defined condition. Nevertheless, we may assume that 25 to 35 percent of Canadians have problems reading.
It is more than a problem. It is a national crisis, in one of the great middle class countries. In principle, the middle class is made up of educated people. So this is a great crisis for us and we have to face it.
The Forum is a positive and interesting initiative to deal with this type of situation.
Extraordinary things are happening in our education systems. Multilingual education is available in many different forms. We have bilingualism through immersion and other educational methods. Bilingualism is creating a youth that is much more flexible, intellectually speaking, because it thinks, and thinks in two or three languages, with a growing number thinking in four.
There is a division between this exceptional education, this capacity for reading and writing on one side, and what is not working on the other side. We must pay attention to our successes on the one side and to what is wrong on the other.
[the preceeding is a translation]
I think that one of our problems as a society -- and this is something the International Forum is looking at -- is that somehow we have a fantastic public education system and yet we are falling down on our ability to encourage or release curiosity among the young. As you can see, there is a class of students here today. They don't want to be bored at school.
You don't want to be bored at school, do you? No. No. You see?
We must think of education and reading as fun and as curiosity driven. We always hear about complex science as being curiosity driven but [this] is far truer of the most basic education. Are we releasing, exploding the curiosity of children and students in this country? If we're not doing that, we're actually creating the problem of the 25 to 35 percent of Canadians who, in some way or another, are illiterate or functionally illiterate or have difficulty with literacy.
Why am I telling you this? Because literacy is a battle which is largely won or lost before people are 10 years old. It's not at the PhD level that the battle is fought.
There are all sorts of very practical things that need to be done. We all know that. We need to have smaller and smaller classrooms so that it is more fun and more personal to be at school -- so that the classrooms can be breeding grounds for responsible individualism. And we also need to have more and more teachers so that these classrooms can be smaller and smaller.
We have to have more and more concentration on reading. There should be less and less studying of chapters extracted from novels, which is possibly the saddest way to teach literature. More and more, we must accept that the kids are really smart and that they can read whole novels, really young, before they know the subjunctive. This is a curious but important point. Increasingly I hear people say: "Oh, they can't read that, they don't know the subjunctive yet," or some such grammatical detail. As if one learned grammar in order to read novels. It is by reading novels that it becomes possible to understand the role of grammar. We read first, we learn the specifics after.
There's a great need to infuse our education system with more books and more reading of a higher quality. Roch [Carrier], you and I have talked about this. More and more in the schools the kids are being offered lists of books from which to choose what they might wish to read. At the top [of] that list is a bit of wonderful literature. Then it works its way down to garbage. The list is handed out and it is left up to the families and the children to chose. And you know to which families that gives an advantage and to which a disadvantage. It's a very, very problematic system.
Protagoras said, probably to Pericles: "Le type d'éducation dont on a besoin c'est une éducation centrée sur les vertus civiques et centrale à la démocratie." Ça c’est vrai. Et ce n’est pas en contradiction avec l’autre ‘besoin’. ["The kind of education we need is an education focussed on civic virtues and central to democracy." That's true. And it does not contradict the other need.]
Education and reading is supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be a pleasure. When Roch [Carrier] talks about the enormous success of Canadian literature for children both in Canada and around the world, it's something that most Canadians don't actually realize. Our literature, written for children in both languages, is one of the most successful in the world today.
I think one of the reasons for this is that we have our famous diversity, the two languages, the regions. That diversity comes through in the literature. That makes it less propagandesque. Because it does not reflect a monolythic culture, it is not really selling something in the same way that many other children's literatures are. And so it finds a public abroad perhaps because of what you might call its independent thinking. It is more aimed at the children and less aimed at some kind of social mission.
Perhaps that success also comes out of our sense of place and our sense of difference as a social strength.
In any case, I hope that this project, which Roch [Carrier] and the Senator [Pearson] are leading -- and which I'm glad to be taking part in -- I hope that this project will help us to understand that there's an enormous amount of fun to be had with literature, but it has to be done very intensely. We have to push it and push it and push it.
Computers are great. But if you can't read, you are quickly reminded that computers are just dumb machines. So, this project is about reading, reading, reading, having fun, crying, laughing, reading and reading and reading ... and more. And if we do all of that, we end up with an interesting society, a civilised society and an educated society.
Thank you very much.
His Excellency John Ralston Saul
