The population of the United States has burgeoned, especially lately, due to legal and illegal immigration. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it's one of the social changes underway in the US that threaten to create a serious reduction in the literacy of its workforce by 2030:
"The decline in literacy is one of the more startling projections in a report that examines what it calls a "perfect storm" of converging factors and how those trends are likely to play out if left unchecked.
"The three factors identified are: a shifting labor market increasingly rewarding education and skills, a changing demographic that include a rapid-growing Hispanic population, and a yawning achievement gap, particularly along racial and socioeconomic lines, when it comes to reading and math.
"The individual trends have been identified before, but this study makes an effort to examine their combined effects, and to project a disturbing future, including a sharply declining middle class in addition to the lost ground in literacy.
"'We have the possibility of transforming the American dream into the American tragedy,' says Irwin Kirsch, a senior research director at ETS and the lead author of the study."
The bad news is that this time bomb seems to be unstoppable. The good news is that there's still time to make real inroads to reduce the problem. All that's missing now is a will to act, something that isn't assured from a government focused on tax cuts and indifferent to the social impacts of its spending.
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