Adult education and historiography The paper aims to explore the role and function of the historical issues within the field of Adult Education and its relations to scholarly historiography to date. Quite similar to the traditional paradigm in the history of education was the history of adult education for a long time also primarily based on pedagogical considerations. Thus research received almost no attention neither from historiography nor from educational science. Despite the current boo…
From the viewpoint of Akademie Remscheid, a leading provider of further education courses involving education through play, this article presents the facets of the phenomenon of play as relevant to education and illustrates them using several examples of play that can be applied to adult education. The focus is on group games which can be played using simple materials. The central fields of learning targeted by play are identified as social skills, perception, expression, creativity and problem…
Federal law as envisaged in the socalled Hartz paper provides for the introduction of education vouchers. Is political education concerned? Against this background, the author explores funding structures of political education on the federal as well as on the Länder plane, of municipalities and foundations. Her verdict is disenchanting: many institutions of political education, especially the very small ones, are facing their end. This is corroborated by two statements of experts from the field…
An essential task for administrative staff in adult education is to develop and offer courses. In the field of economic education (basic education), there exist only very few offers and didactic material. Hence, there is a great demand to describe requirements concerning competencies to be taught in this area. Such requirements for competencies may serve as a base for the development of courses in adult education. This article explores the questions on which requirements concerning competencies…
Vocational continuing education is becoming more significant in modern employment biographies. A growing range of work-based study programmes and the recent opening tendency for persons holding vocational qualifications attracts attention to universities as providers of continuing education. Still, academic formats play a comparatively small role in the market of continuing education. The report explores the reasons for the low acceptance of academic continuing education. For this purpose, 72 p…
Receptive or hostile to continuing education? Course tutors caught between the pressure to conform and resistance This article presents the results of a qualitative dissertation. The author has investigated the acceptance of adult education teacher training courses among part-time and freelance teachers based on the example of the initial adult education teacher training qualification offered by the North Rhine Westphalia VHS (adult education centre) regional association. For the issue of a…
The rising importance of continuing education in the knowledge-based society is undisputed, but the broad organisational and legal area of continuing education has not been surveyed adequately to date in statistical terms. This article provides an overview of the heterogeneous landscape of providers and explains the existing data situation. Following this, the problems associated with a separation between providers of vocational from general education are discussed. Finally, the current changes…
The latest number of the Berichtssystem Weiterbildung (»Further Education Report System«) of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research marks a trend reversal: whereas in the last periods under review an increase in the attendance of further education courses was to be observed, currently attendance is regressive by five percent points – particularly in general further education. The author presumes that one reason for this is education’s focussing on the labour market perspective, an atti…
Didactic transition between education and working life This article examines the orientation of vocational training towards “learning areas” in the context of the larger thematic topic of “occupation and education”. The pivotal question around which the whole topic revolves is whether and in what ways the concept of “learning areas” can contribute to a constructive change in the dialectic between education and occupation. It is with this in mind that the relationship between education and p…
Justice and the right to continuing education Education opportunities are unfairly distributed. In the area, too, of continuing education there are disadvantaged groups of persons who especially have already suffered discrimination during their initial vocational education and training. The demand for equal opportunities which dates back to Aristotle and John Rawls implies that everyone who suffers as a result of insufficient or unsatisfactory results in their initial training should have a…
