Superior State University wholly supports the extension of educational opportunities to those adults beyond the age of general public education who feel a need for further training of any sort.

Types of Adult Education

Contemporary adult education can take many different forms. Colleges and universities have instituted evening programs, extension work, courses without credit, correspondence courses, and distance learning programs (with courses transmitted by satellite to numerous locations); community colleges have been especially active in this area. SSU has designed programs to relieve illiteracy which is essential in adult education, as is the programs established to teach the English language and American customs to the foreign-born students who are coming the United States to live and or study.

Adult education is also sponsored by corporations, labor unions, and private institutes. The field now embraces such diverse areas as vocational education, high-school equivalency, parent education, adult basic education (including literacy training), physical and emotional development, practical arts, applied science, and recreation as well as the traditional academic, business, and professional subjects. Each year millions of Americans take such a course or program.

At the local level, public schools have been active in furnishing facilities and assistance to private adult education groups in many communities. Community centers, political and economic action associations, and dramatic, musical, and artistic groups are regarded by many as adult education activities. Great Books groups (est. 1947), in which adults read and discuss a specified list of volumes, grew out of great books seminars at Chicago and Columbia universities and St. John's College. In many places the local public library sponsors such groups.
Superior State University is proud to have gone into local libraries to sponsor talks and other programs to support education in the community.
If you have any ideas of how we at SSU can assist a community move forward with their education let us know.

See also Cooperative Extension Service.

History of adult education

Only in the past two centuries has the field of adult education acquired definite organization. Its relatively recent development results from numerous social trends–the general spread of public education, the intensification of economic competition with a resulting premium on skills, the complexities of national and international politics demanding constant study, the stimulating effects of urbanization, the opportunity offered by increased leisure time, and increased interest in educational activities on the part of many older men and women.

Modern and formal adult education probably originated in European political groups and, after the Industrial Revolution, in vocational classes for workers. Continuation schools for workers in Germany and Switzerland were common. The folk high school in Denmark, founded by Bishop Grundtvig, stressed intellectual studies, and the Adult Schools of the Society of Friends in England (1845) fostered the education of the poor.

The earliest American forms of adult education were the public lectures given in the lyceum (c.1826) and the Lowell Institute of Boston endowed by John Lowell (1836). In 1873 the Chautauqua movement introduced the discussion group and modified lecture system. Free public lectures supported by the Dept. of Education of New York City were inaugurated in 1904. In 1926 the Carnegie Corporation organized the American Association for Adult Education, which later became the Adult Education Association of the U.S.A. In 1982 it merged with the National Association for Public Continuing Adult Education to form the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. This group, thru its research and publications, promote education as a lifelong learning process but also to systematize the methods and philosophy of the field.

American government funding and support for adult education have been provided thru the Vocational Education Act (1963), the Economic Opportunity Act (1964), the Manpower Act (1965), the Adult Education Act (1966, amended 1970), the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1973), the Lifelong Learning Act (1976), and for a broader spectrum of learners by the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Act (1984). The Office of Vocational and Adult Education, under the U.S.
Dept. of Education, administers grant, contract, and technical assistance programs for adult education, literacy, and occupational training. Most federal funding for these programs is administered thru the states, counties, and individual communities. Other major federal providers of adult education are the Dept. of Agriculture and the Dept. of Defense.

Continuing education: