Education, Adult

The part-time participation of learners 17 years old and over in college courses, in service training, developmental and basic education, and literacy programs. Adult education programs in our nation’s rural areas have a long, distinctive history. Today, 40 percent of rural adults participate in adult education, but ongoing barriers continue to inhibit their educational opportunities. Public policies largely have failed to address the difficulties of rural adult learners.

Rural Adult Education: A Historical Overview

Rural adult education projects emerged early in America’s history. During the colonial period, farmers organized local and regional agricultural societies to increase farm production through an exchange of experiential knowledge at meetings and fairs. More highly organized voluntary organizations followed, such as farmer’s institutes, the Grange, and the Farmer’s Union, which also developed educational projects. Agricultural associations and institutions dominated adult education in rural America, but other educational programs and institutions attempted to meet the demand for knowledge among rural adults.

In 1826, the American Lyceum was established by lecturer Josiah Holbrook along with his audience of farmers and mechanics in Millbury, Massachusetts. The lyceum movement popularized study groups, lecture series, and debates in thousands of small towns from Maine to Florida and through the Midwest. During the slack season of the agricultural year, vacation and “layby” schools allowed farm workers to study reading, arithmetic, citizenship and domestic management. Outreach programs of these types were sponsored by the state, church societies, businesses and individuals, and may be seen as the rural precursors of Literacy Volunteers of America, Adult Basic Education projects, free universities, and in-service training programs.

The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 and, later, the Hatch Act of 1887 enabled the establishment of landgrant universities and agricultural experiment stations in each state, a response to an increasing public demand for agricultural and technical education. Initially, the results of university-based research were disseminated to farmers through printed materials, lectures and exhibits. A notable example of early extension service, the Movable School of Agriculture, was initiated at the Tuskegee Institute in 1906 by Booker T. Washington. The Movable School was designed to reach isolated rural people and communities who otherwise had little or no practical access to the university. A demonstration agent equipped with agricultural tools and exhibits traveled throughout the South in a mule-drawn wagon to provide technical training and assistance in agricultural methods, and upgrade the standard of living among rural Black families. These educational outreach efforts were explicitly designed to match local needs and contexts.

In 1914 the Smith-Lever Act established a more formalized system of university outreach education in the form of the Cooperative Extension Service. At its inception, the Extension Service provided non-credit education in agriculture and home economics through land-grant universities and the USDA. It expanded to include material on marketing, conservation, health and community development. Currently there are approximately 2,900 extension offices that help to meet local educational and outreach needs. While Extension’s role was originally conceived as providing applied knowledge in agricultural and home economics, it now addresses multiple priority areas including economic development, family and consumer sciences and community leadership development. Regardless, its basic orientation toward applied knowledge, lifelong experiential learning and broad educational access remains

Many institutions and agencies support adult education as one of their secondary functions: libraries, the mass media, and health and welfare agencies. Of these, public libraries played a particularly important role in rural America, supporting self-education by providing materials, informational services, exhibits and centers for community projects. Library service to rural areas was largely a phenomenon of the New England states during the nineteenth century, but at the turn of the century, newly formed state library agencies undertook extension services in other rural areas, sending traveling libraries stocked with fiction books to deposit stations in small towns. Following World War II, libraries were transformed from cultural sites to information agencies in response to the explosion of scientific and technological knowledge.

Participation

Nationally representative data show that in 2005, excluding full-time study in college or technical degree programs, 44 percent of adults in the United States reported engaging in some form of adult education. This represents an increase from about 32 percent in 1991. Nearly 27 percent of adults took part in work-related courses and/or training, while over 21 percent took part in personal interest courses. Only 3 percent were enrolled in basic skills/GED courses. Adult education participation in rural areas is slightly (though consistently) lower across all of these categories; in 2005 just under 40 percent of adults in rural areas reported taking part in adult education programs (National Center for Education Statistics, 1994; 2007).

Limited data availability, coupled with problems with comparability of data over time, makes it difficult to track trends in adult education participation in rural areas. However, it is likely that the need for adult education in rural areas will only increase in the foreseeable future. Between 1997 and 2005 nearly 1.5 million rural workers in the United States lost their jobs. Most at risk were those workers employed in low-skill jobs and those with the least formal education. Rural economic change, including the globalization of production, contraction of domestic manufacturing and consolidation within agriculture, means there is an increasing need for job training and retraining as displaced rural workers face shifting and uncertain labor markets as well as employment environments that demand increasing technical skills and knowledge. Regardless, training opportunities are often simply less available than in urban areas (Glasmeier and Salant, 2006).

Barriers to Participation

While adults in rural America have increasing options from which to choose as they pursue their educational goals, consistently lower rural participation rates indicate that ongoing barriers limit the educational access of rural adults. From the earliest days of adult education in the United States to the present, distance and cost have posed significant deterrents. Traditional educational institutions often are located far from many rural residents, and historically have not provided convenient schedules for rural adults. In addition, financial support at colleges and universities is largely restricted to full-time students. This is coupled with the fact that the economic status of nonmetropolitan areas has historically been lower than their metropolitan counterparts, and hence financial need for adult learners is often greater in rural areas.

Personal living circumstances, as opposed to institutional practices, also limit participation in adult education programs. Like their urban and suburban counterparts, rural adults struggle to find time for study, family and jobs, but the extra travel time to distant educational sites magnifies the problem for rural adults. For low-income adults in particular, structural barriers to participation in adult education programs may pose particular challenges. These barriers include cost and problems with transportation, difficult and unpredictable work schedules, lack of affordable child care, and frequent residential movement.

Distance Learning and Adult Education Distance learning was initiated in 1873 with the introduction of correspondence courses through the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. The first established success of this type debuted in 1878 under the Chautauqua movement, which offered home study courses and summer schools for adults. Advancing communications and information technology increasingly holds the promise of helping reduce the geographic isolation of rural communities and improve access to multiple educational resources (Hill and Moore, 2000). However, this promise is largely dependent upon the ready availability of affordable high-speed Internet connectivity in rural areas. The diffusion of broadband services into rural areas continues to lag behind urban areas, in part because of the dependence upon the private sector to build out broadband infrastructure. Additional evidence suggests that net of availability, rural residents may be slower to adopt the use of Internet technology. Together, these indicate a need for increased information technology skills among rural residents, as well as public policies that increase the availability and affordability of rural broadband (LaRose et al., 2007).

Demographic Change in Rural Areas and the Implications for Adult Education Although concentration of minority populations and broader ethnic diversity is generally associated with urban core areas, rural America also contains large minority populations. Furthermore, data show that rural America’s diversity is increasing. For example, the nonmetro Hispanic population has doubled over the last 25 years and is currently the most rapidly growing demographic group in U.S. rural areas. Between 1990 and 2000, Census data show that nearly every state experienced growth in nonmetro minority populations, with much of that increase due to the non-traditional settlement patterns of recent immigrants into rural areas (Kandell and Cromartie, 2004). These changes signal new needs in rural areas for ESL instruction among adult learners (McLaughlin et al., 2008), often in communities with limited resources to address these needs.

Rural areas also tend to have higher concentrations of older residents than in other areas. While less than 12 percent of the population of metropolitan areas is 65 or older, in nonmetropolitan areas that figure is nearly 15 percent. In many places this is a consequence of rural out-migration of younger residents. In other areas it is also partially a consequence of rural in-migration of retirees (Glasgow, 2003). These demographic shifts suggest different kinds of adult education needs, both for older rural residents who may seek a variety of adult and continuing education opportunities, but also for those seeking training in home and health care provision for older Americans (Ritchey, 2008).

Public Policy: Achieving Equity

Policy makers, researchers and rural educators generally agree that federal policy has favored urban and suburban educational concerns in recent decades. An early study of rural adult education (Landis and Willard, 1933) concluded that rural citizens were systematically deprived of educational opportunities, and its authors recommended a national plan of redress. states hold responsibility for education, but where equity is an issue, the federal government has a legitimate stake.

The first comprehensive federal agenda to upgrade rural education in general was introduced in 1982 when Secretary of Education T.H. Bell announced the Department’s Rural Education Initiative, a set of objectives intended to provide a stronger voice for rural education and to rectify an imbalance in Department efforts that favored urban areas. At that time, Department of Education policy stipulated that rural youth and adults receive an equitable share of the Department’s information and assistance. Specifically, the Department supported outreach and volunteer program development, expanded the database on education in rural areas, monitored eligibility and evaluation criteria to insure equity for all Local Education Agencies (LEAs), and included rural institutions in demonstration and pilot projects. In the early 1990s, however, rural education lost priority in the Department as reforms were institutionalized, new priorities emerged and staffs reduced. During that time, the Federal Interagency Committee on Education’s (FICE) subcommittee on rural education disbanded and the Department of Education’s intergovernmental affairs liaison for rural education retired and was not replaced.

The Federal Department of Education in 2004 provided funding to establish the National Research Center on Rural Education Support currently based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additionally, the 10 federally funded Regional Education Laboratories are mandated to devote 25 percent of their efforts toward rural education. Yet in both cases, efforts are directed toward early childhood and K-12 educational contexts. There is currently no comprehensive federal policy addressing rural adult education. Additionally, recent changes in federal assistance programs such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) emphasize workforce participation over education, retraining and job skill development. This may have particular implications for rural areas with shifting labor markets, limited employment opportunities and where retraining is especially needed. Because of this, some commentators have suggested that adult education policy should be part of a broader, more integrated and comprehensive place-based approach to rural community renewal and development (Hill and Moore, 2000). Regardless, rural communities have experienced profound social and economic change in recent decades, and adult education will continue to play an important and likely growing role in the sustainability of rural people and places.

— Kai A. Schafft, Walter G. McIntire, and Susan K. Woodward

See also

• Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service; Education, Youth; Educational Facilities; Land- Grant Institutions (1862, 1890, 1994); Literacy unchanged.

References

• Glasgow, Nina. “Older Rural Families.” Pp 86-96 in Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by David L. Brown and Louis E. Swanson. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003.
• Glasmeier, Amy, and Priscilla Salant. Low-skill workers in rural America face permanent job loss. (Carsey Institute Policy Brief No. 2), 2006. Available online at: http:// www.carseyinstitute.unh.edu/publications/PB_displacedworkers_ 06.pdf.
• Hill, Lilian H. and Allen B. Moore. 2000. “Adult Education in Rural Community Development.” Pp. 344-399 in Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education. Edited by Arthur L. Wilson and Elisabeth R. Hayes. San Francisco: Jossey—Bass, 2002.
• Kandell, William, and John Cromartie. 2004. New Patterns of Hispanic Settlement in Rural America. (Economic Research Service Rural Development Research Report no. RDRR99). http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/ rdrr99/rdrr99.pdf
• Landis, Benson Y. and John D. Willard. Rural Adult Education. New York, NY: MacMillan Company, 1933.
• LaRose, Robert, Jennifer L. Gregg, Sharon Strover, Joseph Straubhaar, and Serena Carpenter. “Closing the Rural Broadband Gap: Promoting the Adoption of the Internet in Rural America.” Telecommunications Policy 31, no. 6-7 (2007): 359-373.
• McLaughlin, John, Maria Rodriguez, and Carolyn Madden. “University and Community Collaboration in Migrant ESL.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 117 (2008): 37-46.
• National Center for Education Statistics. Digest of Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1994.
• National Center for Education Statistics. Status of Education in Rural America. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 2007. Available online at: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2007/ 2007040.pdf.
• Ritchey, Jeffrey A. “Rural Adult Education: Current Status.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 117 (2008): 5-12.