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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">Thank you, Tom, for sharing this with us and for reminding us of the historical landmarks associated with adult education. And congratulations to you and your many colleagues in education who brought about
and sustained these changes for sixty years!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">MaryEllen Vogt<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">From:</span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"> Reading-hall-of-fame <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces@lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Thomas Sticht<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Saturday, July 13, 2024 11:46 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> reading hall of fame <Reading-hall-of-fame@lists.nottingham.ac.uk>; Armstrong, William <wbarmstrong@ucsd.edu>; Hickey, Daniel Thomas <dthickey@indiana.edu><br>
<b>Subject:</b> [Reading-hall-of-fame] Adult Education 60 Years Anniversary<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p style="margin:0in"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">July 13, 2024</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Adult Education for Abundance and Liberty for All: 60 Years Later </span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education (Ret.)</span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Sixty years ago, in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson launched a War on Poverty which included for the first time an initiative to provide adult basic education for under educated adults.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">This year we celebrate 60 years of the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) that was born with the 1964 War on Poverty, morphed into the Adult Education Act of 1966, incorporated into the Workforce Investment
Act of 1998, and into the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 as Title 2: The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act. How the Adult Education Act emerged from the adult basic education program of the War on Poverty illustrates how multiple interests
were brought together to break through a barrier that had blocked the development of an Adult Education and Literacy System for decades.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Abundance and Liberty: The Merger of Interests for a War on Poverty and War For Defense of the Nation</span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">By the beginning of the 1960s, the adult education community had become fragmented into several factions: those seeking recognition for adult education as a broad, liberal educational component of the national
education system; those who sought education for the least educated, least literate adults; and those seeking the conservation of human resources to enhance America’s security and increase the industrial productivity of the nation by giving education and job
training to adults stuck in poverty.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">As it turns out, none of these groups was having much success getting adult education or adult literacy education implemented in federal legislation. Then President John F. Kennedy was elected and he was struck
by issues of poverty, particularly poverty among African-Americans, and he placed the adult education issue within the human resources development framework with its problems of labor force training. He had been successful in getting the Manpower Training
and Development Act and the Area Redevelopment Act for community economic development passed in 1962. But further legislation to combat poverty was stalled. In 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became President. He would soon find
the leverage for breaking the log jam and for moving along his "War on Poverty" which would carry adult education along with it. This time leverage for social action in adult education would come from the nation’s military.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">In July of 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor and later a leading Democratic Senator in the U. S. Congress, was reading an article in the Washington Post. The article said that
about half the young men called for examination for military service had failed the physical or mental test or both. According to his biographer, Godfrey Hodgson, "Moynihan had observed how the sacred plea of national security could be used to persuade politicians
to support causes they might not otherwise care two pins about" After reading the article, Moynihan got hold of the Secretary of Labor and convinced him to have the President establish a task force on manpower conservation for which he, Moynihan, would serve
as staff leader. On September 30, 1963, just two months before he was assassinated, Kennedy established the Task Force on Manpower Conservation, which President Lyndon Baines Johnson continued.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">The Task Force set out to understand why so many young men were failing the military’s standardized entrance screening exam, the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), and to recommend what might be done to
alleviate this problem. Just three months later, on January 1, 1964, the Task Force’s report was delivered to President Johnson. The report was stunning in revealing that one third of the young men called for service did not meet the standards of health and
education. It went on to recommend methods for using the AFQT to identify young adults with remediable problems and to provide them services, such as the Manpower Training and Development program, and the enactment of new legislation that would provide additional
education and training.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">In May 1964, President Johnson gave the speech that launched his "Great Society" programs in which he argued that "The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial
injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time."</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">With his appeal to "abundance and liberty," Johnson captured the interest of those in Congress concerned with employment, productivity, and poverty ("abundance") as well as those concerned with national security
("liberty"). In August 1964, Public Law 88-452, the Economic Opportunity Act, was passed by the Congress and signed by President Johnson. It contained within it Title IIB: the Adult Basic Education program.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Two years later, in 1966, when the Economic Opportunity Act legislation came up for legislative review, adult educators lobbied to move the Adult Basic Education program to the U. S. Office of Education, and
to change the name from the Adult Basic Education program to the Adult Education Act, broadening its applicability beyond basic education. Congress agreed to these changes, and, on November 3, 1966, President Johnson signed an amendment to the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965, that included Title III: The Adult Education Act of 1966.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">With the War on Poverty’s Economic Opportunity Act, the acorn from which the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) would grow was finally planted. Over the last six decades, over 120,000,000 adults have
enrolled in the Adult Education and Literacy System of the United States. These adults have sought the education that they hope will help them find abundance and liberty from the bonds of poverty and underemployment for themselves and their families. For tens
of millions of adults this hope has been fulfilled. This year we celebrate 60 years of the Adult Education and Literacy System of the United States.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">[Sources consulted: Sticht, T. (2002). The rise of the Adult Education and Literacy System in the United States: 1600-2000. In J. Comings, B. Garner, & C. Smith (Eds.), The annual review of adult learning and
literacy (Vol. 3, pp. 10-43). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Online at: <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED508720#:~:text=Sticht%2C%20Thomas%20G.&text=In%20the%20last%20decade%20of,the%20last%20four%20hundred%20years" target="_blank">https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED508720#:~:text=Sticht%2C%20Thomas%20G.&text=In%20the%20last%20decade%20of,the%20last%20four%20hundred%20years</a>.;
Sticht, T. (2022). Adult Literacy and Basic Education in the United States. Online at:</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin:0in"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><a href="https://oxfordre.com/education/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-1744?d=%2F10.1093%2Facrefore%2F9780190264093.001.0001%2Facrefore-9780190264093-e-1744&p=emailAmIJHdYoSIKiw" target="_blank"><span style="color:#1155CC">https://oxfordre.com/education/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-1744?d=%2F10.1093%2Facrefore%2F9780190264093.001.0001%2Facrefore-9780190264093-e-1744&p=emailAmIJHdYoSIKiw</span></a>;
Eyre, G. (2013). An American Heritage—Federal Adult Legislation: A Legislative History 1964-2013. Online at: <a href="https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/Adult_Ed_History_Report.pdf" target="_blank">https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/Adult_Ed_History_Report.pdf</a>;
U. S. Department of Education Annual Reports to Congress on adult education for program years 2011-2012 through 2022-2023.</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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