[FamilyLiteracy 218] Toward A Life Cycles Education PolicyGail Price gprice at famlit.orgTue May 16 10:35:13 EDT 2006
The following is posted on behalf of Dr. Tom Sticht. Thanks Dr. Sticht for sharing your thoughts with us. May 15, 2006 Adult Literacy Education, Geographical Mobility, and Children’s School Achievement: Toward A Life Cycles Education Policy Tom Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education Four decades ago a colleague and I published a paper discussing relationships of geographical mobility, dogmatism, anxiety, and age (The Journal of Social Psychology,1966). In surveys with undergraduates in a college psychology class, we found that students who reported only 1-3 changes in residence (average 1.88) scored lower on measures of dogmatism and anxiety, and were older at the time of their first move (average 7.3 years) than a high mobility group (7-20, average 10.48 moves) with first time moves at age 2.9 years. Additional analyses indicated that early age of first move (before age 5) was more related to anxiety while numbers of moves were more associated with the cognitive/personality variable of dogmatism, i.e., a resistance to change in a belief system. Additional research in the 1960s and earlier also pointed to the idea that more mobile populations have higher rates of psychoses, neuroses, psychopathological personalities, and other types of personality disorders among children and adults. Forty Years Later Moving forward forty years, there is a growing body of research showing that geographical mobility as well as mobility in changing schools is related to numerous problems that children have with schools, including lowered achievement in learning and higher dropout rates (Hanna Skandera and Richard Sousa ,http://www.hooverdigest.org/023/skandera.html, 2002 No.3; Virginia Rhodes, Kids on the Move: The Effects of Student Mobility on NCLB School Accountability Ratings 2005 http://www.urganedjournal.org/articles/article0020.html) Recent studies even suggest a significant, positive correlation between the mobility of students and the schools that are failing to make the grade with the No Child Left Behind objectives. One factor that seems likely to moderate the effects of mobility is the socioeconomic status of the children’s parents, including the education level of the parents. Better educated parents provide more stabile environments -mentally, emotionally, and geographically- for children and hence are more likely to reduce anxiety levels of children, and promote cognitive/personality traits of less dogmatic thinking that welcomes new ideas encountered at school. Toward a Life Cycles Education Policy In 1990, International Literacy Year, Barbara McDonald and I wrote a UNESCO report showing that increasing the education levels of girls and women in various nations produced positive outcomes of lower fertility rates, better childbearing, healthier childbirth, better child rearing, and better educational achievement. Given the important influences that an adult’s education level plays on both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of children’s development and educational achievement, we need to move from thinking about education in terms of how it affects just one life cycle, to thinking about how it affects multiple life cycles. Attempting to intervene on the lives of children alone, even starting at birth, to improve their development and educational achievements is too late. We need to start by thinking about the intergenerational effects that the education of parents can have not only on the ability of the parents to support themselves and their children better in an economic sense, but also how the parent’s increased education can affect the cognitive and emotional development of their children. This shift from focusing on how education affects one life cycle to a focus on how it affects more than one life cycle is what I mean by "life cycles" education policy. It requires that we recognize that adult literacy education is not merely a second chance at education for millions of adults. It may well be the first chance for education for millions of these adult’s children. Thomas G. Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education 2062 Valley View Blvd. El Cajon, CA 92019 Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133 Email: tsticht at aznet.net Gail J. Price Multimedia Specialist National Center for Family Literacy 325 West Main Street, Suite 300 Louisville, KY 40205 Phone: 502 584-1133, ext. 112 Fax: 502 584-0172 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/familyliteracy/attachments/20060516/84512698/attachment.html
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