The first imperative of nationhood is to create wealth, since a stable society cannot exist without the material goods (e.g., food, clothing, medical care, roads and bridges, and so forth) that people create.

So let's say that you lived your entire life on Mars and then somehow fell to Earth and that you landed in the middle of the United States, and you were asked this question:

"What is the largest untapped resource for the creation of new wealth in the United States today?"

The answer is not, for example, solar power or wind power or some mystical nuclear fusion, but, rather, the nation's 10,000,000 undergraduates, who (1) consume great amounts of public subsidy and (2) create virtually no wealth while they are in college.

Although the National Education Project is primarily an academic program for undergraduates, it is also designed to transfer to the illiterate poor the power to create wealth in the technological age; that is to say, reading, writing, and mathematics. For this reason, the undergraduates work as tutors, and only as tutors, for the entire semester. They are not permitted to engage in any other activity.

To make the point another way, this Project is not designed to provide the poor with one more subsidy (food stamps, welfare payments, and the like). This Project is designed to transfer to the illiterate poor the power to create wealth in the technological age. In a word, literacy.

The times support this effort. The country simply may not be rich enough to continue to support millions of college students (who create virtually no wealth while they are in college), while also transferring great amounts of the nation's wealth to increasing numbers of illiterate Americans who are not so much unemployed as they are unemployable.

With the federal government pushing up against a $7 trillion public debt (that is, a growing national debt, as well as growing yearly interest payments), the states already complain that Washington is not providing enough funds for essential services, especially Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of health care. But this may not be a result of perceived federal parsimony or of the present state of the national economy. Rather, it may be that the established structure for creating the nation's wealth is simply no longer sufficient to meet the needs of the people, and for this reason, there is no longer enough wealth to go around.

This concern also encompasses the funding of Social Security payments for future beneficiaries.

As a result, it may be time to examine the fundamental question of how wealth is created in America in the modern age, and how the "pie" of wealth can be made bigger, and by whom. And in this examination, the nation's undergraduates may come to play an increasing role.

Once the National Education Project is in operation on a large scale, the undergraduates from this Project would teach vast numbers of illiterate Americans to read, with two profound effects regarding the nation's fundamental capability to create wealth:

1. Teaching someone to read is a creation of new wealth in and of itself; and
   
   
2. The newly literate would be employable in a technological economy and empowered to create vast amounts of new wealth over a working lifetime for themselves, their families, their employers, their communities, and for the Nation.

And the undergraduates, themselves, by doing the tutoring as part of a three-credit college course, would get a more realistic and more profound education in the bargain.

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