[Reading-hall-of-fame] Adult Education 60 Years Anniversary

[Thomas Sticht]

July 13, 2024



*Adult Education for Abundance and Liberty for All: 60 Years Later
                                                           *



*Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education (Ret.)*



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.


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.



*Abundance and Liberty: The Merger of Interests for a War on Poverty and
War For Defense of the Nation*



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.



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.



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.



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.



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."



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.



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.



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.



[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:
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED508720#:~:text=Sticht%2C%20Thomas%20G.&text=In%20the%20last%20decade%20of,the%20last%20four%20hundred%20years.;
 Sticht, T. (2022). Adult Literacy and Basic Education in
the United States. Online at:

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;
Eyre, G. (2013). An American Heritage—Federal Adult Legislation: A
Legislative History 1964-2013. Online at:
https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/Adult_Ed_History_Report.pdf; U. S.
Department of Education  Annual Reports to Congress on adult education for
program years 2011-2012 through  2022-2023.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/pipermail/reading-hall-of-fame/attachments/20240713/198fecfa/attachment-0001.htm>