Education, Adult

I

Introduction

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.

II

The Diversity of Adult Education

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.

III

The Development of Adult Education in Britain

For much of the English-speaking world, the forms of adult education developed during and after colonialism draw on British experience. Widespread adult education developed in Britain along with industrialization and the growth of the demand for popular democracy, yet its roots stretch back in religious education to the beginnings of organized Christianity in the British Isles and, in secular education, to the Renaissance. King Alfred, in the 9th century, was a passionate and committed adult learner for the benefit of himself and others, establishing educational institutions to spread learning among the population; however, books were scarce before the invention of the printing press, and popular knowledge was mainly shared through the pulpit and the troubadour.

The Renaissance acted as a fillip to secular as well as religious enquiry, and public lectures on scientific subjects, attracting large attendances, are recorded in London from the 16th and 17th centuries, but more widely from 1700. During the period leading up to the English Civil War, thousands of pamphlets on how the world should be organized stimulated debate. Later, coffee clubs, newspapers, and libraries all fostered a learning culture; and a wide range of bodies, including the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the Welsh circulating schools, and dissenting schools, all contributed to spreading literacy.

Nevertheless, it was, in Britain, the Industrial Revolution and the growing concentration of population in towns that extended the opportunity for ordinary working people to gain instruction “in the principles of the Arts they practise, and in the various branches of science and useful Knowledge”. The Mechanics’ Institutes were founded on these principles. They started in Glasgow and London in 1823 and spread rapidly across Britain and to Australia. Like many later initiatives, the Institutes attracted radical manifestos and reformist practice in the debate about what constituted really useful knowledge. The Christian Socialist Working Men’s College was founded in 1854; Quaker-influenced adult schools followed later in the century, and, with the rise of the new unionism, the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) was established in 1903. Parallel initiatives to bring education to workers prompted the rise of university extramural provision, and from 1919, following a key policy report, local government provided mass adult education opportunities for people to gain qualifications through “night school” or to keep fit, extend their creativity, and stretch tight budgets through a crafts and domestic skills curriculum. From the 1920s, community schools, based on the Cambridge Village Colleges, involved adults and children in complementary studies on single sites. Together, the WEA, the universities, and local authorities offered a rich and varied menu of education for self-improvement. However, they also marked a clear separation of learning for pleasure from vocational education.

World War II offered the largest-scale general education programme mounted by employers when the army’s Bureau of Current Affairs offered compulsory adult education for soldiers to discuss the shape of the post-war world.

After World War II there was a marked shift from practical to leisure-based learning. Increasing affluence led to a demand for languages and lifestyle courses, and rapid expansion of provision overall, but adult education failed to attract those people who had benefited least from initial education. A series of measures addressed this issue from the 1970s. In 1975 a major campaign was launched to teach literacy and numeracy to the six million adults in Britain with basic skills needs. English programmes for speakers of other languages settling in Britain, programmes targeting people with disabilities, and women’s studies initiatives followed as providers targeted excluded groups. Access courses, which developed in the 1980s, offer adults one-year courses preparing them for entry to university. However, adult education in Britain, and in many other industrialized countries, remains more effective at reaching the affluent and those with extended initial education.

A

Broadcasting

Just as the growth of libraries had a major impact on adult learning in the 19th century, broadcasting had a comparable impact in the 20th century. It brought people access to information and the stimulus to learn, free at the point of use in their own homes. The literacy campaign was launched on prime-time television. The Open University, which opened to students in 1971, exploited this power, with a broadcasting-led distance education degree programme, delivered in modules, with high-quality print materials, supported by face-to-face tutorials, and an exclusively adult, part-time student population.