[NLA] End of celebration of AELS

[Thomas Sticht]

Concluding a Celebration of 35 Years
of the Adult Education and Literacy System of the United States

Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education

Early in fiscal year 1967, the Congress of the United States passed the
Adult Education Act and President Lyndon Johnson signed it. This act
created the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the United
States as a publicly supported education system alongside the public K-12
school system for children and the public higher education system for
young adults. In FY 2002, this system was in operation for 35 years.

To celebrate 35 years of the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of
the United States, organizations in six states invited me to make
presentations on adult education and literacy development that included
one of the following two topics:

A Lifetime in Adult Basic Skills: Some Lessons Learned

The POWER of Adult Education:
Moving From the Margins to the Mainstream of Education

All presentations included implications for advocacy, policy, and
practice. Some sponsors used the presentations to attract media attention
for advocacy purposes.

The Circle of Celebrations

The Celebration of 35 years of the AELS started on the Atlantic seaboard
when Elyse Rudolph of the Literacy Assistance Center of New York City 
organized a meeting at its offices near Ground Zero in April. Later,
working from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, Deborah Simmons organized
a celebration for the Minnesota state adult educators at Breezy Point,
Minnesota; David Godsted arranged a celebration by the New Mexico
Coalition for Literacy in Las Cruces, New Mexico; I arranged a celebration
in San Francisco, California for the International Reading Association;
Mathew Scelza and Jose Cruz arranged for celebratory presentations for the
meeting of California Literacy, Inc in Sacramento, California;  and
Delight Willing arranged a celebration in Seattle, Washington by Seattle
University. Finally, in October, Charlie Houghton brought the celebration
tour full circle, and I made a final presentation on the East coast in
Marlborough, Massachusetts for the Massachusetts Coalition for Adult
Education.

Altogether, over 2,000 adult educators, volunteer tutors, students,
business leaders, government officials, and members of the press
celebrated the 35 years of progress and accomplishments of the Adult
Education and Literacy System of the United States.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the sponsors of the
celebration speaking tour, the 2,000+ participants, the NLA list members,
and the hundreds of thousands of others who have worked over the last 35 
years to make this unique federal/state/local educational system for
America’s adult learners the third branch of publicly funded education in
the United States.

During the last decade of the 20th century the AELS had over 38 million
adult enrollments. This offers dramatic testimony to the valuable place
that non-credit, lifelong, adult education plays in contemporary times.

It is my sincere hope that in the first decade of the 21st century, the
services of adult educators in the Adult Education and Literacy System of
the United States will reach tens of millions more of America’s neediest
adult learners.

CONGRATULATIONS ON 35 YEARS OF
THE ADULT EDUCATION AND LITERACY SYSTEM OF THE UNITED STATES!



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