Well, two things come to mind. First of all, as a society, can we afford to abandon people and have them not making a contribution? I don't think so, but even more specifically, the children who are at risk of having literacy problems in the future have parents. A lot of the literacy delivery that's happening now is called family literacy. We work with the parents and the children together, because just trying to help the kids without helping their parents and building the literacy of the whole family won't work. We have to do both.
On September 28th, 2006. See this statement in context.