Enrichment of Life or Work

Is adult education primarily for the enrichment of people's lives or do adults continue their education out of a desire to help their careers? Due to where I work, a learning community that provides safety and skills training to workers trying to enter and move up in the petrochemical and oil refining industry, Adult Education fits best into the second classification; a commodity that is acquired and purchased so we can remain more competitive in the workplace.

I think of all the people we see every day for training. Are they there because they woke up and thought they want to enrich their lives? They do not. They come to our eLearning lab because they are required to take training before stepping foot into a refinery. Without our training, there would be no paycheck. We may offer free training on new safety techniques or other skills development, but these are never or rarely taken.  I think of this class and course of study. Am I doing it to enrich my life? Yes. Ultimately, I'm doing it to be better at my job, to be more effective at delivering training, and my boss has asked me to do this so we can be more competitive in our industry. For a while I allowed myself to take a free class on Duolingo to learn Spanish. This was done to enrich my life for sure, but not only did this tail off and get crowded out by other needs and priorities but had a secondary reason in that many of my co-workers and trainees speak nothing but Spanish.



Brown writes that characteristics of adult education include: 1) The work must be voluntary, 2)It must be taken during leisure time, and 3) Must be somewhat continuous and consecutive (p. 465). On first reading, this might make the reader reason that the second question is more valid, that it adult education is done to enrich our lives, but in truth, the above characteristics will fit into the first question, that it is done to help in the workplace. All three of these characteristics, even the voluntary and leisure time, can be a part of a commodity to help advance a career. My trainees may come during work hours and it might be required training, but even the training we do after hours, that the trainee's volunteer for is ultimately taken to improve their chances to advance at work,



There might be some element of life enrichment associated with adult education, but speaking purely about the aspects of adult education that I witness every day, the primary rationale for adult education is as a commodity for moving forward in a career and be more competitive int he workplace.



Brown, F. J. (1932). Basic Principles Underlying Adult Education. Journal of Educational Sociology, 5(8),  463-47. https://doi.org/10.2307/2961482