OTTAWA — Canada could slip into Third World status if its education system is not reformed to produce innovative and creative graduates who can compete globally, say experts responding to the latest report from the Canadian Council on Learning.

"The education system that Canada has is going to lead us to produce more and more people who are chronically unemployable," said futurist Richard Worzel, who studies societal trends and patterns to help clients plan for the future. "What this means for the country is the gradual slip into Third World status."

The Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) spent five years studying Canada's education system from the preschool to post-secondary level and reports that, compared with other industrialized countries, Canada is falling behind in many key areas, and that is creating a national knowledge disadvantage.

"In the future, countries will compete on the basis of their collective brains," said Worzel, whose clients include Ford, IBM, Bell Canada Xerox and Nortel.

He said within a generation, the economies of highly industrialized countries will be divided into three types of workers:

- Gold collar workers, who are the creators and innovators in society;

- Menial labourers, who work for low wages, are paid hourly and are often on contract;

- and the unemployable, who have no marketable skills and cannot find work.

Among its findings, the independent, non-profit research council noted in the report released Wednesday that Canada has no single measurable national goal, benchmark or assessment of achievement for any phase of education.

Investments in early childhood education in the country are among the lowest of the Organization for Economic Co-operation countries (OECD), which has resulted in 25 per cent of five-year-olds entering the education system poorly prepared.

Canada also ranks low among OECD countries in the number of graduates in science and engineering, who are key drivers of productivity.

Moreover, 42 per cent of Canadian adults have what the council considers "low" levels of literacy, meaning they "perform below the internationally accepted minimum considered necessary for participation in a knowledge society."

Paul Cappon, president and chief executive officer of CCL, said Canada is not setting the conditions for future success.

He agrees with Worzel that Canada risks falling behind such formerly underdeveloped countries as India, Brazil and China — "and it's no accident it's these countries that are buying up our big firms," he said.

Cappon pointed out that Canada is the only country in the world that doesn't have a federal ministry of education.

Moreover, the European Union has integrated the education and training systems of its members states, he said. So much so that high school students in France and Germany have the same history lessons.

However Penny Milton, CEO of the Canadian Education Association, a pan-Canadian research group, questions whether a national strategy will somehow produce the kind of learning system that the CCL is calling for.

She said the country needs to focus on the nature and quality of teaching and not necessarily on national benchmarks.

"We need to not only measure whether students can read and write and do math but to be experienced problem solvers," she said.

Milton added that Canada educates its most able students just as well as any other country. However, the key is to improve the levels of equity among all Canadians.

"These kinds of changes are fundamental," she said. "They are not achieved by broad-scale policies, but by policies that enable teachers and schools to actually focus on new approaches."