There is a rich tradition of adult education throughout the world. The history of this educational endeavour is different from place to place but inevitably reflects a variety of strands.
Amongst these strands are vocational or on-the-job training at a technical or managerial level, personal growth and enrichment, social mobilisation, literacy and numeracy, and professional career development. Out of this heritage have come certain insights:
- adult characteristics
- where and when adult education takes place
- who is likely to get involved
- how adults learn and
- how best they should be taught or, according to some, helped to learn
While there are some suggestions that these insights apply more generally to how humans learn, the dominance of school as the central site and methodology of educational instruction for children has left adult educators with postgraduate and informal education as their primary areas of study.
Adult Characteristics
Adults do have some attributes that are almost universally recognised. In fact, these attributes are used to define when a person becomes adult rather than their chronological age. The legal age of adulthood may vary from one society to another. There are indeed some societies that have extended both childhood and adolescence - and in this way separated out even large sections of postgraduate education from the study of adult education.
Adults are assumed to be aware of their educational needs, mature enough to select whether and in what form to obtain education, experienced through life and work to be able to reason and apply any particular learning to this range of experience, to be able to choose when and where to study and learn, and to be willing to bear the cost of that learning (whether this is a cost in terms of time, money or lost opportunities). Adults are assumed to have limited time and to have to balance the demands of family, job and education. They may also be assumed to have already acquired knowledge of themselves and the world, sufficient to survive on a daily basis if not to control their environment to their own satisfaction. In other words, adults are not tabula rasa, or empty slates, on which someone else can write.
Where Does Adult Education Occur?
Adults choose the place where they wish to engage in educational activities. Mainly, they prefer places that are oriented to their needs. A large proportion of adult education takes place in the workplace or the home or at sites where adults have a positive association. These may include community halls, churches, or other gathering places and, in some countries at least, in postgraduate institutions.
While some of the venues may be prepared for specialist instruction, adults often use venues that are used for some other purpose. Primarily, adult education takes place in small groups, although there is an increasing trend toward the mass convention both in commercial and religious educational opportunities. Where social movements engage in educational activity, they may also do this in large group settings.
When Do Adults Engage in Educational Activities?
Where education is programmed, as opposed to informal, it is likely to occur outside normal working hours. As a result, many programmes are scheduled for the evening or the weekend. Adults must therefore make choices about attendance at such events and carry other activities during their personal time, unless they are able to arrange education during working hours.
When working hours are used, adults may be forced to forego earnings in order to attend. Otherwise they may have to put in additional hours to make up time spent on education. In these cases, as in the decisions about use of personal time, there are significant costs and, therefore, those adults who do attend educational activities are both highly motivated and highly demanding of the outcome.
Education programmes that are able to make attendance easy, or at least reduce any possible conflicts with attendance, are likely to have a better chance of attracting a wider group of people.
Who Gets Involved in Adult Education Activities?
There is some evidence to suggest that adults undertake self-chosen educational programmes at particular times in their lives. In addition to this, those who have positive experiences of education, especially at primary and secondary levels, are more likely to choose a formal programme of education.
In particular, those who are facing career choices or personal choices, who have personal time, or who understand that their ambitions will not be fulfilled without additional qualification will participate in formal programmes. People in institutions with their own educational programmes linked to career advancement may be directed towards these programmes, but not all adults have this privilege.
As a result of this self interest, adults cannot be expected to select an educational programme merely because it is available. There must be a clear advantage, but this advantage need not always be further certified qualification. Those who believe that the education will make a difference to their lives or those closest to them, either by meeting a particular need to solving a specific problem, are likely to choose to attend. Based on certain limitations, they may also choose to engage in the learning activity if it does not involve attendance but rather reading, viewing, or listening.
Adults will choose how best to spend their limited resources of time and money. Educational programmes that entertain as well as educate, that reach out to people where they are rather than expecting them to attend, and those which most obviously relate to their day to day existence are likely to meet with more success. But educators should not underestimate the commitment that most people have to community and to personal enrichment.
How Do Adults Learn?
People do not need to attend an educational programme in order to learn. Many people will continue to learn from experience - from doing things themselves, from watching others and imitating or improving on what they do, from trying something and, when all else fails, "reading the manual" or following sets of procedures drawn up by those who have gone before them.
Those who learn best, as opposed to merely repeating themselves, are those who reflect on what they have done and how they have done it. The insights of these reflections determine the manner in which they behave in the future, and this in turn leads to experience and to change.
Over time, adults become better at what they do if they are able to make sense of and reflect on their experience.
This disciplined reflection is not always easy, particularly if the experience is complex or if it comes laden with emotions that cloud what is happening. It may also be the case that people do not have all the knowledge available to make sense of what is happening. Certainly generations of people looked at and navigated by the stars without changing their view that the earth was at the centre of the universe.
Educators, therefore, play a role in providing this knowledge to assist adults in reflection, framing their experiences by listening carefully to and providing educated insights into this experience, and by creating opportunities for adults to "unpack" or differentiate experience through limited, safe, and constrained exercises and assignments, and through guided reading and study.
The Lecture
If adult learning is about disciplined reflection upon experience, and if educators are charged with assisting adults to learn rather than to teach, why are the majority of educational activities so similar? Most consist of lectures or presentations by someone presumed to have experience or knowledge desired by those listening.
Lectures are not necessarily an efficient way of transmitting knowledge. Nor are they an effective way of assisting people to learn. Yet they continue to dominate educational programmes. Adults are not necessarily reliant on others for their learning. Even when they have chosen to attend the lecture, they are likely to come to it with a range of skills, knowledge, prejudices, and reflective ability that they use to assess and evaluate the information they are being given. Where they want knowledge or information, a good lecture can provide this in a setting that enables the adult to draw conclusions about the reliability of the information - by assessing the reactions of others, by asking questions, and even by monitoring and assessing the demeanour of the lecturer. These cues make a lecture or talk quite different from watching a film of the same lecture in private.They are potent additives to the learning experience.
Given access to resources, and the time to experiment, an adult may even discover that a lecture makes an impact on substantially behavioural skills. But educators will not want to rely on inefficient forms of information transmission if they have the ability to extend the learning experience to include rehearsal, practice, and reflection.
Learning Styles
Adults do appear to have different learning styles. Some find it easier to learn in community or small group settings, others from individualised or more anonymous learning activities, some from doing things and experimenting (with concomitant failure),Still others require coaching and small successful increments.
Given that education for adults, especially voter and civic education, is voluntary and multifaceted, those who find a particular approach most congenial are likely to select a programme that fits. Where this does not happen, adults are quite likely to drop out of the programme. Programmes that have an element of the compulsory about them will need to come to terms with the styles of those who are participating.
In a programme attempting to reach a large number of adults, variety will need to be incorporated to allow people to select facets that enable them to learn most effectively.
