Abstract:

The explicit concern for adult education is a priority for the public policies in all the countries, not only for the education systems, given the challenges of the current stage of the social development happening on a global scale. The constant growth of interest from the experts in education, much more important after the second half of the twentieth century, was wholeheartedly supported by the sociologists and psychologists’ research, joined by the significant contribution of the economic environment. If the interest of the contemporary economic area for building a more accessible and more effective learning environment for adults is justified as a premise for increasing the individual professional performance and also to support team work, the neoconservative trends in this field cannot be ignored. We analyze in this regard the roots of adult education which are identifiable in the classical pedagogy in order to find a way to reconcile the two main directions already mentioned.

This paper aims to analyze the manner in which a given set of social, behavioral and educational factors contribute to the redefinition of the key concepts for the adult education, so that its implementation in the new European reality, and not only, should not be disturbed by the divergent points of view in the areas marked by multicultural models. If the perspectives on modernity and postmodernity are carefully analyzed even in the educational space, we consider that new approaches to adult education are necessary. For adult training, the contemporary society can benefit more from the opportunities and chances that it has to provide in different contexts the elements by which the individual may be supported on the difficult road of defining and redefining his or her own identity.

Adult education in Romania, a country recently liberated from the political regime of Soviet origin, is positioned at the major redefinition time, given the need to adjust to the demands of a society which is found in an increasing dynamics, and to the expectations of the capitalist environment which the country joined in the last two decades. One of the main challenges facing adult education in the post-Soviet areas is the mentality of regulation and constraint which entitles the leadership to impose the working procedures in society, in relation to which the lifelong education is no exception, especially as far as the continuous teacher training is concerned. Due to the lack of relevant methodologies, adult education has not met the expected qualitative stages and the adults are not willing to attend such courses. This is one of the reasons why, in the continuous teacher training it was necessary to impose a minimum level of credits obtained from some courses dedicated to adults. This paper also analyzes the documents regulating this issue.

Keywords:

education, adult, modernity, capitalism, chance, Romania.