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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…
Strata, Class, Milieu. Reference strategies in research on continuing education 1957-2007 The author provides a longitudinal look at 50 years of research on participation in continuing education. After presenting some important publications from 1957 (Schelsky, Dahrendorf), he presents sociological reference strategies which were used in the respective time periods to explain the social structure: first strata and class, and then later – due to the influence of Bourdieus – the social milieu: H…
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…
Gender skills for adult education Gender mainstreaming is a central maxim for political action all across Europe. However, little effect is yet to be felt in adult education. Where there is gender-sensitive adult education, this is still strongly oriented towards the differential approach. In view of participation rates in general and vocational adult education, and the division of interests within the segments, which is again gendered, the author speaks of a “doubly divided structure”. For …
Large parts of adult education are not being reached through relevant laws at all anymore. Thus a factual deregulation is the consequence. This loss of scope faces a growing provision profundity of those laws thar are tangent to the adult education area and that have been revised lately. The author draws attention to this ambivalent context by means of the most important legal basis of adult education: the adult education laws of the German states and the social statute book III (SGB III).
Already Max Scheler developed a functional definition of education. With Scheler, education is not only not opposed to usefulness, but even prerequisite for reaching certain aims at all. In terms of the postmodernist media and mass society the relationship between education and usefulness has to be reformulated. With reference to Lyotard, the author develops a concept of education as a regulative idea. Under these conditions, individuals are not expected to integrate themselves culturally into…
Trends with expectations and pretensions in further education in the context of changed work place conditions It is worked out in the contribution that because of changed work place conditions, especially in the area of information and communication technologies, an altered need for further education has developed. Concluding, possible consequences for the providers of adult education are sketched
