ADULT EDUCATIONof the revolution. In the decade following 1966,
China conducted one of the largest and most
disastrous adult education programs in history.
The Cultural Revolution spawned a severe and
mandatory form of experiential learning that re-
placed much of higher education by sending pro-
fessionals and officials with suspect class pedi-
grees, intellectuals, professors, and students into
agricultural villages and factories to be reeducated
by proletarian labor and incessant exposure to
Mao-sanctioned communist propaganda.
In spite of the social control service to the
dominant regime that it was designed to deliver,
socialist adult education played a very significant
role in the rapid industrialization and moderniza-
tion of agrarian Russia and China. In the market
societies of the West, the unplanned and longer-
term realization of such development did not en-
tail centralized efforts to transform adults for new
roles. The systems of political and social control
did not generally require the systematic and con-
tinuous indoctrination of adults. Thus, until the
second half of the twentieth century, adult educa-
tion in the West remained largely a function of
individual and small group informal education,
voluntary and philanthropic organizations, rela-
tively small government efforts, specialty units of
the system of formal schooling, and small training
programs in proprietary schools and businesses.
CONTEMPORARY STRUCTURES AND
PARTICIPATIONAfter 1950, adult education grew in scale and
organization. The pattern of this growth involved
a shift from adult education delivered by commu-
nity-based organizations to that provided by for-
mal educational institutions and the training in-
dustry. Demand for education among adults grew
because of increasing rates of technological inno-
vation, professional specialization, organizational
complexity, knowledge intensiveness in goods-and-
services production, and rising credential require-
ments for employment. Adults returned to sec-
ondary and postsecondary education in steadily
increasing numbers. In the United States, the GI
Bill sent the first large wave of these new students
into colleges and universities after World War II
(Olson 1974). In the 1960s and 1970s new or
expanded units of formal education were organ-
ized to accommodate and recruit adult students in
both Europe and the United States: college adult
degree programs, open universities, evening col-
leges, programs for accrediting experientially based
adult learning, and government and school-dis-
trict sponsored adult high school completion
programs.Higher education attendance among adults
continued to accelerate in the 1980s and 1990s as a
result of several factors: multiple stop-in, stop-out
college career paths; rapid obsolescence of knowl-
edge and associated multiple career changes through-
out a lengthening cycle of life and work; increased
requirements and rewards for specialized gradu-
ate, certificate, and technical education; and, most
significantly, the large returning student popula-
tion among Baby Boom adults. In turn, the grow-
ing market of adult students spawned new forms
of higher education. In the 1990s, the for-profit,
fully accredited University of Phoenix became the
largest private university in the United States, with
over 65,000 adult graduate and undergraduate
students (Winston 1999). Phoenix provides a li-
brary that is entirely electronic, uses both branch
campuses in strip malls and office buildings and
Internet-delivered courses to provide education
nationwide, and employs only forty-five full-time
faculty and more than 4,500 adjuncts. Internation-
ally, ‘‘mega-universities,’’ such as Britain’s Open
University and China’s TV University—100,000
and 500,000 students respectively—deliver educa-
tion to adults through diffuse networks of distance
education technologies and part-time local mentors.
Collectively, the new virtual (i.e. based entirely on
the Internet), distance, for-profit, and mega-uni-
versities, all oriented primarily to adults, are begin-
ning to significantly alter the structure and prac-
tice of higher education worldwide.Training and development programs witnessed
similar growth after World War II under the im-
pact of a combination of forces. New technologies,
especially those associated with information tech-
nology production and use, and increased rates of
innovation, required education for entirely new
skill sets and for continuous upgrading of existing
knowledge. Increased job mobility required more
new worker training. More intense, global eco-
nomic competition and new understandings of
the contribution of training to productivity and
profitability led to greater training investments by
firms, agencies, and individuals.