ADULT EDUCATION‘‘universal education’’) and from informal educa-
tion occurring in avocational and domestic con-
texts, to nonformal education conducted by volun-
tary organizations to increasingly institutionalized
formal systems.
Prior to industrialization, informal and nonformal
adult education was relatively widespread in Eu-
rope, especially in England and North America,
and especially among the growing urban middle
class of artisans and merchants. As this new middle
class sought to acquire its share of the growing
stock of culture, and as literacy spread and became
intrinsic to social and economic participation, adults
increasingly engaged in self-directed study (aided
by a publishing explosion that included a growing
number of ‘‘how-to’’ handbooks) participated in
informal study groups, and established cultural
institutes and lyceums that delivered public lec-
tures and evening courses of study.
Systematic efforts to spread adult education
to the working class and the general population
emerged during the process of industrialization.
Until the last decades of the nineteenth century,
these were almost entirely voluntary efforts devot-
ed to democratization, social amelioration, and
social movement goals. In both Britain and the
United States, mechanics’ institutes, some with
libraries, museums, and laboratories, delivered
education in applied science, taught mechanical
skills, and conducted public lectures on contem-
porary issues. In Scandinavia, ‘‘folk high schools’’
performed similar functions. Religious groups con-
ducted literacy campaigns among the new urban
masses and established adult educational forums
in organizations such as the Young Men’s Chris-
tian Association (YMCA). Women’s suffrage groups,
labor unions, abolitionists, socialists, and many
others developed educational programs both to
develop their members and as an organizing tool.
After 1860 and until World War I, efforts to
popularize education among adults continued in
various ways: in an extensive network of lyceums,
rural and urban Chautauquas and settlement
homes; in educational efforts to aid and accultu-
rate immigrants to the burgeoning industrial cit-
ies; and in post-slavery self-improvement efforts of
African Americans. These middle- and working-
class adult education activities received consider-
able support and extension from the spread of
public libraries.
In most societies, state support for and spon-
sorship of adult education has always been scant in
comparison to that for schooling children and
adolescents. Late nineteenth- and twentieth-centu-
ry imperialism included modest adult educational
efforts designed to selectively spread literacy and
educate indigenous peoples as functionaries for
colonial administrations. Some higher-level adult
education of the type delivered by the mechanics’
and folk institutes received public funding, espe-
cially in Nordic societies where leisure time and
adult continuing education were well provisioned
by the state. With the Hatch Act of 1887 and
enabling legislation in 1914, American land-grant
universities were charged with developing ‘‘exten-
sion’’ services to deliver a wide range of education-
al and technical assistance to farmers and rural
populations. The agricultural extension model lat-
er expanded to include technical training and
assistance for industry, and night schools and
continuing education for adults. Public funding
for these developments was minimal; extension
services beyond the land-grant mandate, to the
present, have usually been expected to operate as
fiscally self-supporting units.Robust state support for adult education oc-
curred only in the socialist societies that emerged
after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Beginning
with the mass literacy campaign initiated by the
Bolsheviks, adult education was an important pri-
ority of the Soviet regime (Lee 1998). It estab-
lished a large and wide-ranging formal adult con-
tinuing education system, with branches in virtually
all institutional sectors of Soviet life. It was intend-
ed to foster ideological allegiance to the Soviet
system, develop the Soviet workforce, spread so-
cialist culture, and foster progress in sports and
the arts. A nonformal, decentralized system of
‘‘people’s universities’’ paralleled and reinforced
the formal system. After World War II, Soviet-style
adult education was transplanted to most of its
Eastern European satellites and, usually in severe-
ly truncated form, to the developing societies of
Asia, Africa, and Latin America that followed the
Soviet model. After the communist victory in 1949,
China began its own mass literacy campaign for
adults. Later it developed a near-universal system
of ‘‘spare-time’’ and other adult schools that trained
students for very specific political, economic, and
cultural roles in the new society, and for political
and ideological conformity to the tenets and goals