THE
UNITED
A merican
A MAGAZINE OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP
Devoted to the Cause of
Americanization, Assimilation and Group Elimination; Pointing the way to a Constitutional
Americanism, to Equality in Citizenship, and a better understanding
between Native born and Foreign bom.
Vol. 4
&ÄOU9 22
April, 1926
Number 7
THE COMING ERA OFADULT EDUCATION
PREPARING THE ELDERS FOR CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY
By Robert C. Deming
Director, State Dept, of Americanization, Hartford. Conn.
Pres. Dept. Adult Education, Nat. Education Ass’n., U. S. A,
ADULT EDUCATION is in the immediate fore-
*"“■ ground of the field of American and European
education. It is particularly alluring because the edu
cator deals with a matured and questioning mind
voluntarily seeking information and because the
problem per se involves issues that challenge our edu
cational and civic ideals and concern the national
welfare.
Too long have public school officials dodged the
responsibility of educating those adults in their com
munities who as potential citizens are unable to share
in the responsibilities of citizenship because of a lack
of an elementary education in reading, writing and
speaking of English and civics. It is appalling to con
sider what a fourth grade reading test in English
would reveal if applied to the adults of our Eastern
cities, those upon whose intelligence our Democracy
depends. And then add to those “American illiter
ates” the forty-nine per cent of the electorate who fail
to vote! Under the irreducible minimum of education
used by the United States Census Bureau to define an
“illiterate”, those of that description over twenty-one
years of age who have had no schooling whatsoever,
would have outvoted the combined votes cast in the
last election of Maine, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Cali
fornia and Alabama. Are we efficient in the scope of
our public school education?
Adult Elementary Education is the first step in a
program of adult education that is beginning to stir
the imagination of even the more deeply entrenched
educational mud-turtles.
While the actual figures of the native and foreign
born illiterates are appalling, facts are more convinc
ing. Facts and figures are not entirely the same. It
is a fact that twenty-one states are now carrying on
state programs of Adult Elementary Education; that
some 300,000 pupils were registered last year; that
eleven states have normal training courses for
teachers; that courses of study, texts and methods,
etc., have been printed in numbers, and the work is
not only recognized as a technical and specialized
work for which teachers must be trained, but in
many states it is accepted as an integral part of the
public school curriculum. Adult Education is now a
recognized department of the National Education
Association.
Adult pupils learn with great rapidity, they are
voluntary pupils, the teacher and pupil are often a
source of mutual inspiration. There are related
problems at present of far-reaching importance —
the hundreds of thousands of aliens who will not
attend school, the registration of aliens, the pitfalls
of naturalization, social adjustment, the retard
ation in school of children with non-English speak
ing parents, the immigration problem, etc.
One step higher and we find adult education in the
evening high schools, vocational classes, business
courses, and yet higher, in University Extension
work, Business Colleges, Libraries, Chatauquas,
public Forums, all sources to which men and women
earning their daily bread may have recourse after
working hours.
There is at present an attendance of adults in the
evening schools in London, England, of five times the
number attending these schools in New York City.
One asks why the demand for such education ?
Probably the desire for self-expression in a mechan
ical age which offers the observance of machinery by
day and motion pictures by night, the desire to match
age against experience, to philisophize, to specialize,
to apply a critical analysis which was not desired in
youth’s training under a mere amassing of facts under
compulsory education, and very possibly a desire to ac
quire useful information to apply to better citizen
ship and life, and even possibly the very human de
sire to obtain the badge of an educated man, i. e.