[Reading-hall-of-fame] Workers and Mothers of the World Unite in Education

[Thomas Sticht]

May 1, 2025



Workers and Mothers of the World Unite in Education



Tom Sticht, International Consultant in  Adult Education (Ret.)



On May 1, 2025, we celebrate International Workers Day, also known as May
Day, a day for celebrating the working men and women of the world as they
labor for personal, family, and community development. Ten days later, on
May 11, we celebrate Mother’s Day. Adult literacy educators have long known
about the importance of educating mothers or mothers-to-be for improving
the educational development of their children (e.g.: Stewart, C. (1929).
Mother’s First Book: A First Reader for Home Women, available online using
a Google search).



The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, first signed into law on July
22, 2014, addresses both workforce and mother’s educational needs with a
focus on basic skills (English,literacy,numeracy) development within Title
II: Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA).



A special sub-program within the AEFLA, Integrated Education and Training
(IET) focuses directly on workforce education that combines adult basic
skills education with workforce preparation and training, focused in some
instances on specific occupational fields.



Significantly, research on workplace education programs has indicated that
such IET programs may not only improve the basic skills of the adults in
the programs, they may also stimulate adults to better interact with their
children to improve the children’s basic skills thereby increasing family
literacy.



Research by Wider Opportunities for Women found that mothers enrolled in
basic skills (literacy, numeracy) education, often integrated with job
training, reported that they spoke more with their children about school,
they read to them more, they took them to the library more and so forth.
These increases in cognitive and non-cognitive behaviors of the mothers’
children happened even though there was no teaching of these types of
parenting activities. These types of changes in the parenting behaviors of
the mothers was obtained for free as a spin-off of adult workforce basic
skills programs (Van Fossen, S. et al., 1991. Teach the Mother and Reach
the Child. , available online using a Google search).





See Sticht (2018)for more on how numerous organizations , including
the American
Federation of Teachers, the Secretary of Labor’s Commission on Necessary
Skills,   the Work in America Institute, Wider Opportunities for

Women, and adult education in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand,
and UNESCO,
have called for and provided adult basic and workforce skills for Workers
and mothers of the United States and the world.



Reference: Sticht, T. (2018). Mainstreaming Marginalized Adults:
TheTransformation
of Adult Basic Education in the United States (online using a Google search)
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