By Annette Greenland, Ed. D

Downhill Farm, Vilonia

Pretend you're staring at a blank screen. Think about the term adult education in Arkansas. Now let typical-for you-adult education scenes pop up on the screen.

Look closely. If you see small groups of people working on basic math and reading skills, or taking practice tests for a GED exam, or carefully repeating English words spoken by a teacher or tutor, your definition of adult education is one held by much of the Arkansas general public.

Perhaps you also see people watching a cake-decorating demonstration or taking a supervised turn with a welding torch. Those fit, too, into this everyday, perhaps unexamined notion of the scope of adult education.

I contend that a definition of adult education built on only these kinds of representations is too delimiting; it's stereotyped, marginalizing, and often condescending, especially as compared to what could be envisioned or included.

I propose to M-Ark readers (and anyone else who wanders near my soapbox) that the term adult education should conjure up a panorama of programs, activities, and adult learners in at least four areas:

(1) the offerings of proprietary agencies which have adult education as their main focus; these include business schools, correspondence schools, technical schools, and independent residential and nonresidential centers;

(2) agencies which were established to serve youth but have taken on adult education programs as a secondary function: public schools, community colleges, and four-year colleges and universities;

(3) agencies designed to serve both educational and noneducational needs of the community; adult education is an allied function for these agencies, which include libraries, museums, and health/welfare agencies; and

(4) agencies established to serve special interests of certain groups. In this category are businesses and industries, labor unions, government agencies, churches, and voluntary associations, all of whose adult education activities serve to promote those special interests. (continued below)

This typology, adapted from a three-decades-old one developed by adult educator Wayne Schroeder, is one of many classification systems into which various forms, purposes, and providers of adult education have been sorted.

I chose it because it illustrates my point, even though it's inadequate for current times. (I took the Cooperative Extension Service out of his second category because I don't agree that it was originally established to serve youth. Several newer forms of adult education, such as those available via the Internet, don't fit very well into his "boxes." And . . . I consider graduate school and other high-level, continuing professional education to be adult education, too!)

Why my tirade against the narrowness of the prevailing public perception of adult education here (and elsewhere)? Because my own perspective of adult education was transformed during a 12-year absence from Arkansas.

By 1985 I had been managing an off-campus credit-course program for Phillips County Community College for six years, learning first-hand about adults' yearnings for more education and about the barriers and frustrations that many faced. I went off to graduate school, then taught master's students in adult and continuing education at a North Carolina university for eight years.

I met dozens of people who were already working with adult learners and who sought graduate work to enhance their performance. From them I learned as much as I had gleaned from textbooks about adult motivation to learn and the array of settings in which adult educators work. I enjoyed good "give and take" about various adult education theories and philosophies, particularly those built upon shared identification of and approaches to individuals' educational and personal goals.

Upon my return to Arkansas six years ago, I let some time elapse before deciding that the public understanding of adult education hadn't broadened very much here. It was still perceived as primarily a deficiency model, designed to "fix" inadequacies in basic and job-related skills.

For this essay, I carried out some Internet searches that I hoped would prove me wrong; they did not. (I was nearly swayed, though, by the number and kind of computer courses offered by the Conway Adult Education Center along with their basic skills and GED programs. CAEC was the topic of 31 of the first 50 "hits" in my online search for adult education in the January-June issues of Conway's Log Cabin Democrat.)

I scanned an online list of Arkansas government agencies, www.accessarkansas.org/directory] for adult education and adult programs, finding what I sought near the end of the long list.

The Department of Workforce Education, which was set up while I was out of the state, is now "[r]esponsible for the management and administration of public secondary and postsecondary vocational, technical, and adult education programs and vocational rehabilitation programs." (The emphasis is mine, its intent an illumination of a still-apparent narrowness of assigned scope and function.)

A serendipitous discovery brightened my serious search for accessible "evidence" of Arkansas adult education: I found expansion, enrichment, and solid bases for pride in programs in areas I thought-at the time I left the state in 1985-were inadequately understood, under publicized, and underappreciated.

See what you think: Check the Arkansas Adult Education Resource Center's site [www.aalrc.org] for a glimpse at what the state--aided by a corps of volunteers--offers in literacy, other basic skills, GED programs, and "LINCS" to the rest of the country.

M-Ark-ers: Would you argue for a smaller or larger umbrella over varieties of adult education than I do? Am I or am I not giving the "public" enough perception points? I'm looking forward to your feedback.