Literacy Ain't Just for the Young!

When I tell people I teach reading to adults, I often get a lot of...interesting looks.  Some pity me, assuming I get the absolute "worst" of society: drug addicts, high school dropouts, felons, criminals, homeless people, jobless people, etc.  Others assume my students are only there as someone forced them there, demanded they stop being the drain on society they so obviously are.  Even a few assume I spend my days desperately trying to force adults to learn things they have NO interest in learning.  Heck, I've even had a few tell me I just repackage lessons and get my summers off...while I was packing up to go teach a class in July that I had spent an entire weekend designing.

...yeah...about that...

I don't get mad at these people.  (...well, okay, I got mad at the last one for being condescending, but that angers me in people who verbally attack people who aren't me.)  Instead, I just view them as someone who has no idea of what I do everyday, and that's okay.  I just see it as another opportunity to educate people.

It's not uncommon for people in adult education to joke that we're a forgotten field.  Much of the literacy funding that's available in the USA goes to children's literacy.  Honestly, that doesn't surprise me: it seems a huge chunk of the educational movements in our country are focused on "our future," with "the future" soundly considered to be those who are under 21 or, in many cases, 18 years of age.

But is that the right approach?

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a TEDx Talk about the growing need for adult literacy instruction in our nation and beyond.  The speaker (Daphne Greenburg) spoke about being an adult literacy tutor and the many people she encountered in her line of work.  Even as a professional in that field, it spoke to me.

Many of those students sit at the tables in my classroom.

You can ask an adult education professional (instructor, program director, tutor, etc) for what kind of people make up their classrooms, and I'd almost bet that most people would counter with "Just start naming the types of people you know.  We've got them all."  And they'd be right.

• I have high school graduates, and I have high school dropouts.
• I have college graduates, and I have college drop-outs.
• I have currently employed people and demoted workers, and I have jobless people seeking work in a rural, impoverished area.
• I have people holding down steady jobs--people who want to move on to new fields of work.
• I have people with steady jobs who got hurt on said job and now cannot perform their duties and are forced to make a career change.

In short, just like in any other population, you cannot make sweeping generalizations of adult learners.  That term alone can also refer to adults going back to college, and how often do we truly refer to those learners as lazy, inconsiderate, criminal drains upon society's lacking resources?  This is a vast injustice as these people, though not the "future," are a huge growing concern for our society.  They deserve as many educational opportunities as the young.

Who knows: how many of them, like Greenburg says, will be going home to some of the very same learners childhood literacy movements are trying to reach?  Does it not benefit children to surround them with adults who understand the value of education?