The Future of Adult Literacy

Recent  (Trump and the fracturing political party system) and longer term (wage stagnation, ballooning inequality) developments will militate for drastic changes to our education systems if we want democracy and/or capitalism to be meaningful concepts for any significant portion of US citizens.

These should certainly include free community college (if not four year degree programs), free technical and vocational education, and a capacity for all education systems to frankly explore models of power and class structures in the US, historically and moving forward.

Just as important, though, will be a public commitment to lifelong learning that must also be supported as much as possible by private institutions (who generally, if not universally, depend on direct and indirect benefits provided by public investments). Given the realities of adult life, a lot of this will be digitally based.

Online education is still very new and will take at least a generation for it to even begin to realize its full potential.  It faces many challenges along the way, not the least of which is how it will be differentiated as well as integrated with other forms of public and private education and training.

I am especially interested in how digital education will develop and employ strategies like "game-ification" and modes such as collaborative learning. Right now I see Google Drive (integrated with Google and other online services) and Khan Academy as strong forefront models. There is also promising productive work being done with language based platforms such as Vocabulary.com, and (of course) the many excellent foreign language programs available for free (like Duolingo) or at cost.

An important next step is to develop online learning management software that is open to integrating many such platforms while also providing ethically sound access for accountability as well as program improvement purposes. Again, this will be very challenging, but all adults need to be given the tools to coordinate their own life-long education as citizens, producers, and family members while having access to principled guidance from skilled, informed educators acting as coaches or advisors.

Workforce development should certainly have a place in the future of an humane, life enhancing, set of educational systems.  But while literacy skills, basic or advanced, may have ties and connections to specific workplaces or career ladders, they should never be allowed to limit or bind down human potential.  Confronting forces and tendencies that militate otherwise will always be (as it always has been) the most fundamental challenge to any collectively funded set of educational systems.