Adult Education and Literacy

Adult Education and Literacy Should Be Looked at More Closely

I have had the chance to work as a probation officer for a time period, and in no other profession has I seen the importance of adult education and literacy, not only in expanding the opportunities of getting a job but also in keeping people from going to prison.

I remember the first month that I began working. I was still at the Academy and eventually had the chance to meet with my first probationer. He was a young man who had quit of high school. He was far behind on his probation fees, and when I asked him why that was, he said it was because he could not find a job anywhere.

I asked him how difficult he was trying to find job, and he said that he got out each day and visited numerous places with absolutely no luck whatsoever. I asked if he thought it was because he was on probation that he wasn’t getting job offers, and he said he felt that was part of it, but part of it was also the fact that a lot of the places wanted at the least a high school diploma. He actually told me that he had a few employers tell him that they were not as worried about him being on probation as they were about his lack of education.

I began considering adult education and literacy referrals for such a probationers straightaway, and soon found out that GED and high school equivalence chances were proposed extravagantly. Universities have them. School districts and libraries provide them, and most of them are actually pretty inexpensive.

From that point on, any time I discovered one of my probationers didn’t have at the least his or her GED,I would refer them to an adult education and literacy program, and basically start to watch their lives improve. Not only were they getting an education and working toward a diploma or GED, but they were gaining more confidence and their self-worth being improving.

I soon started to see where my probationers which had gone through an adult education and literacy program were getting pretty decent jobs, and able to accomplish the conditions of their probation. More important than that even was that once they had completed their terms of probation. They were not coming back.

It has always been amazing to me to see how much an education can do for a person. I observed a lot of my probationers participate in adult education and literacy programs and improve the quality of their lives in a way that most of them never imagined possible.

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