[NLA] Working Toward Self-Destruction

[Eileen Eckert]

Tom,
I guess I share Pam's (mis)conception of the mission of the AELS and think 
that if K-12 successfully served all children, we wouldn't be needed and 
that there are myriad formal non-remedial lifelong learning opportunities 
like continuing education, professional development, higher education degree 
and certificate programs, etc, plus as many informal activities as there are 
people. I don't feel the need to preserve a certain level of illiteracy to 
ensure myself a job, and I doubt there are many who do!

That said, I'd love to have a different framework for understanding our 
work, one that doesn't put us all in the position of simply remedying a lack 
and then going away. I wonder how much that idea of the system contributes 
to a deficit perspective of the learner. Can you post a statement that 
distinguishes your conception of the mission of the AELS from the above 
understanding?

Thanks.
Eileen




>From: Thomas Sticht <tsticht at znet.com>
>Reply-To: nla at lists.literacytent.org
>To: <nla at lists.literacytent.org>
>Subject: [NLA] Working Toward Self-Destruction
>Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 13:56:46 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Are We Planting The Seeds Of Our Own Destruction?
>Tom Sticht
>
>Pam said, "Just because so much emphasis is being placed on the K-3
>reading programs today should not be such a cause of terror for those of
>us serving those children's parents, siblings, grandparents, etc.  We
>should only hope their efforts with our children are highly successful; we
>should hope that we will be out of jobs in another generation or two.  Of
>course, that won't happen to all of us.  But is it so wrong to hope for
>that?  When we feel threatened by something, shouldn't that motivate us to
>work harder and smarter for that which we believe?"
>
>In this quote, it was the statement that "…we should hope that we will be
>out of jobs in another generation or two" to which I want to call
>attention. This seems to me to be based on the belief that the Adult
>Education and Literacy System of the United States is simply a remedial,
>repetition of the K-3, second-chance education system, and that the AELS
>is just a necessary though undesirable, temporary inconvenience and drain
>on society, until the K-3 education system is fixed. Then, once that
>happens, there will be no need for the AELS, adult literacy educators will
>no longer be needed, the AELS along with the jobs of the adult literacy
>educators can be eliminated, and society will reap the benefits of the
>demise of the cost of the AELS.
>
>For the Literacy Summit of February 2000 I prepared a paper entitled The
>Adult Education  and Literacy System (AELS)  in the United States: Moving
>From the Margins to the Mainstream of Education (the latter phrase was the
>basis for the title of the later Action Agenda report). In this paper, I
>wrote a section called Rethinking The Basic Nature and Mission of the
>Adult Education and Literacy System in which I called attention to what I
>thought were a number of misunderstandings of the AELS. One of these
>misunderstandings, was the one referred to above, the idea that the AELS
>is a temporary, remedial, second-chance education system that will go away
>once the K-12 system is fixed.
>
>Clearly, Pam’s comments indicate that the idea that I referred to as a
>misunderstanding is not confined to those outside the adult literacy
>education field, and that has led me to wonder how many agree with the
>position that Pam has taken, that is, once the K-3 or K-12 system is
>fixed, there will be no need for the AELS.
>
>What does this position imply for the possibility of achieving the goal of
>the Action Agenda that calls for a strengthened adult education, language,
>and literacy system in the U.S.?
>
>What implications does this position have for the idea of the AELS as a
>permanent, lifelong learning system for adults?
>
>Does this position weaken our advocacy for the AELS as a viable third
>branch of publicly funded education in the U.S.?
>
>
>
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