The importance and purpose of Adult Education
Adult education (Andragogical education) has developed to meet adult learning needs by providing educational services within the framework of their lifelong development. Adults, like children and young people, need to receive educational services throughout life. This is because adults have developmental tasks, responsibilities, expectations, and roles that they have to fulfil and achieve. Therefore, adult learning is not limited to the knowledge covered by compulsory education. Adults may always want to learn new knowledge and skills and improve themselves.
Characteristics of adult learning
It is very important to know the physiological characteristics of a person as well as the personal education. Since it is not possible to give adult education without knowing the adult, it is necessary to know the characteristics of the adult first.
The prominent characteristics of adults are summarized below;
| Adults are people with a developed self-concept; they expect to be treated as mature people and for their personalities to be respected, |
| They want to take an active role in activities, |
| They do not like unnecessarily strict authority, |
| Adults have a wide range of experiences and enjoy using and transferring these experiences. |
| They accept new learning that is in line with their experiences and tends to resist those that are contrary to them. |
| They are problem-centered. |
| Their learning needs are mostly based on the problems they face. Since their time is valuable, they are not interested in learning that is not directly related to their problems. |
| They want to hear praises. |
| Adults have personal concerns and need a safe environment. |
| They have high expectations for themselves and their educators. |
| They want the educational environment to be one, where participants and educators act together, where there is freedom of expression, free from fear of punishment and ridicule. |
| There may be differences in the expectations of adults depending on the society or group they belong to. An individual’s occupation, income, education level, gender, whether they are married or not, where they live and their religious beliefs play an important role in their participation in activities. |
| They have pre-occupations outside a specific learning environment. |
| They make difficult choices. |
| They develop group behavior compatible with their needs. |
| They are emotional. |
| They have selective filters. |
| They need rest. |
| They secretly fear being replaced. |
| They are fond of their social status (Gürbüz, 2014) |
1.2 Who is an adult?
The definition of an adult varies from country to country and culture to culture, but the World Health Organization (W.H.O) considers anyone over the age of 24 to be an adult.
In many societies, the beginning of adulthood is defined as the completion of schooling and employment. Since adulthood covers a long period, it includes different experiences. In other words, an adult is an individual who has completed his/her physical and mental development in such a way that he/she can take care of himself/herself and others, making decisions aligned with the societal expectations. As an adult grows older, he/she has to change his/her roles and therefore his/her expectations, again.
Robert James Havighurst, educator and expert in human development and ageing, named this process of evolution as “developmental tasks”. Developmental tasks are tasks that, if accomplished in a certain period of an individual’s life, lead to the individual’s happiness and success in subsequent tasks, and if not accomplished, lead to the individual’s unhappiness, social disapproval, and difficulties in subsequent tasks. Adulthood is divided into three periods: young, middle, and old age.
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