Abstract
Over the past decade, a significant body of work has explored the impact of neoliberal globalization (Rizvi & Engel, 2009) on all levels of education. The focus of much scholarship on adult literacy in advanced capitalist nations has been to critique the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) project to explicitly link literacy to economic productivity through surveys starting with the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). For example, Walker (2009) asserts that OECD framing of literacy operates as the ideology of “inclusive liberalism” and Rubenson (2008) argues that indicators such as the IALS have been used to “manufacture a consensus” that “more strongly integrate[s] education into the core of labour market and economic agendas” (p. 257). Darville (1999) points out that, by measuring sight-reading ability, IALS constructs literacy as “the counterpoint of flexibility as labour force attribute” (p. 280) which will increase productivity and national competitiveness.
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