The biggest challenge to educating so-called “low-skilled” adults is probably the poor education they received when they were kids. When we talk about these people as though they are somehow inherently different than other adults, we forget that they were once kids, too. Address the problem at the proper time and it’s not a problem later on.

The so-called “skills-gap” may be a red herring. Many American companies, wary of another economic dip, are hoarding cash. Hiring of all kinds is lower than it should be. Competition for jobs is artificially tight. This squeezes out many people, even the highly-skilled in some cases, who might otherwise find high-quality employment.

American companies are also down on training these days. Relative to a generation or two ago, the amount of training new employees receive has diminished greatly. Yet Millenials, those coming into the workforce for the first time in this decade, say they value training immensely. If American companies opened up their war chests, and opened their minds to training, things might be different.

But we must deal with life as it comes to us. So we must help adults develop skills for the same reasons we help kids develop them. But we must also realize that the challenge of educating adults is very different—and much more challenging.

If the private sector sees little value in improving the skills of its workers, the work will largely be left to the government. And we wouldn’t be working so hard at K-12 education reform if the government was a good educator to begin with.

Then there’s the simple truth that adults are much harder to teach than kids. There are at least two reasons for this: some may have had bad experiences in school; and all bring with them a world of knowledge that is harder to shape and a lifetime of habits that are harder to change.

Finally, it seems counter-productive to label people as “low-skilled” and then expect them to succeed educationally. Most school kids aren’t particularly well-skilled, but we don’t label them as such simply because they haven’t learned something yet.

Like so many gaps we like to reify in America, we may be painting ourselves into a corner here with a poor choice of language. As with the achievement gap, focusing on the differences between one group or another doesn’t produce the desired result, it just emphasizes differences when we are hoping to achieve similarities.

Instead, we need to focus on the intellectual growth of all of our people—and speak to the strengths which reside in all of us rather than focusing on our weaknesses. We know that a deficit-based model of schooling is bad for kids. Why, then, do we think that it would be good for adults?

We would likely fair better if we just talked about skills instead of skills gaps. And better still if we just talked about people who aspire to better lives and how we might help everyone pursue their aspirations.

When we use impersonal, program-oriented phrases and group people by associating them with artificial identities (and negative identities at that), we turn human beings into slogans, slogans into statistics, and meaningful real life challenges into meaningless abstract social and economic concepts.