Adult Education

Education, Adult, any organized and sustained learning programme designed for and appropriate to the needs of adults. Usually, adults need to fit in study alongside other domestic and work responsibilities; they bring a diversity of experience to their studies; and they study voluntarily. “Adult education” is an inclusive term covering all types of education and training activities for adults—formal and informal, whether offered by schools, colleges, universities, voluntary organizations, industry, or public service bodies.

Adult education takes different forms in different places at different times, reflecting the different social functions given to adult learning, and the different groups with access to opportunities. In ancient Greece, Athenian society was organized to enable a small class of people to pursue learning as the central vocation of their adult lives. However, adult learning was not then seen to be universally useful. In Denmark, adult education was central to the regeneration of a poor agrarian economy, inspired in the 19th century by the Danish poet and educator N. F. S. Grundtvig, and built on the development of and support for active and participative democracy. That commitment to popular participation and social justice remains central to adult education in the Nordic countries. In Britain, “adult education” has often been taken to mean part-time studies that do not lead to certification; in the United States, it is seen as a generic, all-inclusive term. However, in more than half the world, it is synonymous with adult literacy, with programmes of reading and writing for people with no initial schooling.

By the 1980s millions of adults were participating in formal or informal opportunities for learning, yet adult education was almost invisible to policy-makers. In public debate, education was interpreted as schools and universities, and training was concentrated on new, young entrants to the labour market. However, changes in the structure of the economies of industrial states have made lifelong learning more central to social policy. Demographic, technological, and industrial change, the emergence of information economies, and of global markets combine to make lifelong learning vital to international competitiveness. This has led to a demand for credit-bearing courses, for opportunities to have recognized the learning that adults have previously achieved. It has led to the need for qualifications that are transferable, and to the need for modes of study flexible enough to be fitted round the other pressures on adults’ lives (see also Education, Vocational).

Because industries now have a shorter life, and because there is a high level of international mobility, there are pressures for qualifications to be harmonized. In Australia, with 40 per cent of professional workers coming from abroad, the new national qualifications system has been built around the National Office for Overseas Skills Recognition. In South Africa, the new South African Adult Basic Education and Training strategy is based on a qualifications system, with a clear competence statement for every standard. Similar measures are part of the policy frame of the European Union, too.

Adults now make up the majority of participants in post-compulsory education in Britain and the United States. Their participation is increasingly in qualifications-bearing and work-related study. The prospects are that they will demand and get increasingly adult-friendly structures in which to study. In Britain, though, an increased commitment to vocational opportunities for adults has been bought at a price, with weakened public commitment to courses offering learning for its own sake.