Adult basic education needs more investment

There has been much talk lately about how Manitoba can strengthen its economy and improve its general well-being. Adding a third component to our education system, one that would be equal in funding and recognition to K-12 and post-secondary education, would do just that.

That third component, adult basic education, already exists, but with inadequate funding and little recognition.

Adult basic education includes adult learning centres that offer mature high school diplomas to those who have not previously completed high school, and adult literacy programs that bring adults up to high school entry level.

Adult basic education works well. Since 2003, some 25,000 Manitobans have earned their mature high school diplomas. Enough graduates move off employment and income assistance, saving the provincial government money, and into full-time employment, increasing the government’s tax revenue, so that over a 10-year period the government makes more than it spends on adult basic education. The system pays for itself.

We know from previous studies that for many adults, graduating with a mature high school diploma is transformative. Graduates’ self-esteem and self-confidence soar. Their families are strengthened, many pulled out of poverty as parents move into the paid labour force. Their children do better in school. There are well-documented reductions in health care and criminal justice costs that follow from improved levels of education. The graduation of so many Indigenous adults — Indigenous adults are involved in adult basic education at a rate two and a half times their share of the population — contributes to the important process of reconciliation. There is a steady stream of benefits that flow from adult basic education.

Yet, effective though it is, there are not enough adult basic education resources in Manitoba to meet the need and the demand. A study done in 2013-14 reported that there were 192,000 Manitobans aged 18-65 with literacy levels sufficiently low that they could not fully function in society.

In northern Manitoba, fewer than 50 per cent of high school students graduate from high school.

So, why don’t we value adult basic education, given the many benefits it produces and its cost-effectiveness?

A big part of the reason is that, in Manitoba, as elsewhere in Canada, we have got it into our heads that if you don’t complete high school in your teens, you are a “failure” and deserve to be left behind.

But conversations with adult educators over the years make it clear there are many valid reasons for leaving school before graduating. The number of those who are being left behind grows continuously — 10 per cent of high school students, year after year after year, do not graduate “on time” — i.e., within six years of starting Grade 9. They are then deemed to be “failures.”

But the real “failure” is that we have not sufficiently invested in the third component of our educational system — adult basic education. We have come to think of education as being K-12 and post-secondary. We invest large amounts in those parts of our education system because we all benefit from doing so. But we would also benefit by investing at a similar rate in adult basic education.

The current Manitoba government has come to see the enormous benefits of adult basic education. The last provincial budget increased the allocation to adult basic education by $2.5 million. That money has been put to good use over the past year in strengthening the adult basic education system.

But if that budgetary increase is treated as a one-time measure, the gains it generates will be lost.

By reimagining education as comprising three — not just two — components, we would be thinking long term, which is what is needed to address so many of our societal problems. It would be planning into the future in a systematic and preventative fashion, rather than responding after the fact to crisis after crisis, as we so often do these days.

What the provincial government did in their 2026 budget, when they allocated an additional $2.5 million to adult basic education, should be done again in the provincial budget that will come out in spring 2027, and the province should continue to do so into the future, until adult basic education is funded at a level consistent with K-12 and post-secondary education.

That would be a genuinely game-changing investment in Manitoba’s future.

» Jim Silver is professor emeritus at the University of Winnipeg and a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba. This column previously appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.