ABSTRACT
For the past several decades, family life in the United States has undergone a tremendous transformation. In 1889, people were judged literate if they could sign their names. But that was the era of the farm-and-buggy economy. In the machine economy of 1939, being literate meant completing the sixth grade. Today, however, the postindustrialized culture of the information-processing age of computers and high technology requires a bare minimum of reading and writing skills at the high-school-graduate level. Changes in the workplace are so dramatic and unpredictable that people must be ready to adapt to jobs that did not even exist when they were in school. With 25 million citizens who cannot read or write, and an additional 45 million who are functionally illiterate (i.e., who do not have the reading and writing skills to find work), the number is said to be growing by more than two million a year. Yet in the postindustrial era, the majority of the people in the workforce must make a living with their hands and their minds.
