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"Our Nation is at risk....If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
These statements come from the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education's devastating 1983 report, A Nation at Risk. Among the indicators of the risk facing America were the findings that about 13% of all 17-yearolds in the United States could be considered functionally illiterate, with functional illiteracy among minority youth running as high as 40%. In addition, 23 million adult Americans were declared functionally illiterate.
A Nation at Risk called for a "learning society" with "a system of lifelong education that affords all members the opportunity to stretch their minds to full capacity, from early childhood through adulthood." (pp. 13-14). But beyond this rhetoric, the report did not call for the greater development of the Adult Education and Literacy System that was created in the federal Adult Education Act of 1966.
Two months before the release of A Nation at Risk, I released a report through the Human Resources Research Organization in Alexandria, Virginia, entitled Literacy and Human Resources Development at Work: Investing in the Education of Adults to Improve the Educability of Children. In this...