Conclusion

Abstract

As the foregoing chapters have made apparent, adult education is an amorphous field, comprising different traditions and different understandings of who is involved and what its purposes are. Definitions are bound to be exclusive, often deliberately so. We have seen how some types of adult education take the form of "adult schooling" and simply provide adults with a "second chance" to meet basic high school requirements. It is by now apparent that some forms of adult education do not extend beyond the narrow remit of adult training and, we have argued throughout, that there are also forms of adult education which are run on a purely commercial basis with the needs of the marketplace playing a dominant role.