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Businesses recognize that they must get involved in local education for the good of their own future work force:

More than one-fourth of Missouri's adult population reads and performs at a level below eighth grade.

More than 10 percent of the state's adults read and perform at a level below fourth grade.

The impact of the illiteracy problem on businesses is great. Illiteracy causes lost productivity and quality, lost time for additional supervision, lost dollars for absenteeism, high employee turnover, accident and worker dissatisfaction.

And businesses are recognizing their personnel departments must expend greater effort to find and hire qualified workers.

The challenge to overcoming illiteracy begins on the local school level. New approaches to students' learning that motivates them to want to read, and providing such materials to the schools that will turn a "video" child into a "reading" child is a necessity.

Here at The Southeast Missourian we have begun a program known as Newspapers In Education that excels in meeting the objectives of a more literate and reading population. We hear consistently from teachers that the 2450 newspapers delivered daily to area schools are met with heightened interest by their students to READ about the "real" world!

Not only is the newspaper reading habit a way to interest students to read more, the added bonus' are better informed students, community minded students, and better educated students!

Newspapers know, because they've covered the story with some alarm that reading scores have been dropping. Colleges are offering basic reading and writing courses to freshmen who should have learned such skills long ago.

That's not all on the illiteracy front! Tests of social awareness show that young people don't know how their government works and are not familiar with people and issues in the news.

"In spite of one of the highest levels of spending (per capita) in the industrial world, the American public school system is generating students who rank 13th out of 13 advanced nations in science and math, and 11th out of 13 in social studies an language."

How does this effect our business community?

One of the economic mysteries of the past twenty years is why the nation's productive growth suddenly fell from nearly three percent a year to one percent and even less.

John Kendrick, a leading, economist emeritus from George Washington University, who has studied this downward trend of productivity has maintained for some time now that, contrary to traditional capitalist notions, investment in business equipment explains less than a third of the nations' productivity trends. The leading element, accounting for perhaps 70 percent, is what Kendrick calls "the knowledge factor."

To put it simply, as knowledge advances, so does output. Knowledge and understanding are our most important form of capital, and generate increased productivity.

Knowledge = wealth.

The above equation, suggests that all real wealth has always been seen as ideas and thought! Therefore our primary capital investment must be in knowledge, literacy, education!

When a student opens a newspaper they know the newspaper offers them something they want and need, better than any other information source - relevant, up-to-date information.

Newspaper managers are starting to look at young people with more concern and respect. The "total newspaper" concept now includes how to approach students as both present and future readers - lifetime readers.

Business must now start to look at young people with more concern and respect, as well. They must invest in the capital of knowledge and information - young minds. They must approach helping to educate students as a strong capital improvement.

Investing in the Southeast Missourian Newspaper in Education program is one of the most rewarding capital ventures a business can make - with the greatest return - a literate, productive work force.