Lifelong learning has become a dominant theme of education and training polices across the advanced industrial nations.

The nature and organization of work has changed so rapidly in the past decade with the introduction of new technologies and the effects of globalization that learning has become a lightning rod, attracting all sorts of new attention outside educational debates. 

Race and ethnicity are factors that act in major ways in determining how our society functions. Whether you divide the world into South and the North, East or West, or look within national cultures with diverse peoples, race can be tied to one’s social and economic status.

Gender analysis is a useful tool which adult educators can use in their struggles for social justice. It is a complex activity which basically represents an optimistic attempt to end disparities and disadvantages among different genders.

The concept of class is indispensable but elusive.

There is a growing interest in workplace learning. This seems set to continue as the securing of skills throughout working life becomes, globally, an important priority for governments, industry, and workers themselves.

Those who study and practice adult education have tended to be more interested in questions about what and how adults learn than in questions of how to organize adult education.

Although organizational learning has been a subject of research within management and organizational studies at least since the early 1960s, interest in this concept has grown considerably since the late 1980s.

Although the term informal learning has been widely used for a long period of time, its precise meaning remains elusive and contested. The term is normally invoked in opposition to formal learning and/or formal education, and has, therefore, much in common with the terms nonformal learning and nonformal education.

The slogan of lifelong learning basically involves the simple message that learning can and should be a lifelong occupation.

Paulo Freire (1921–97) was one of the most influential educationists of the twentieth century.

This article focuses on the biographic perspective and how this can illuminate the nature and processes of adult learning in unique ways.

Although adult education practice has a long history, the area only became recognized as a field of study and theoretical development in the 1930s. 

Adult learning is a phenomenon at once deceptively simple, yet enormously complex. 

In the introduction to the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Adult Education and Training, the editor points out that adult education is heuristic, multidisciplinary, eclectic in orientation, and that its knowledge base is diffuse and incomplete (Tuijnman, 1996, xv).