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Summary Chapter 1->10, 15, 16 of Book: Harold W. Stubblefield;Patrick Keane. Adult Education in the American Experience: From the Colonial Period to the Present (Kindle Locations 2930-2934). Kindle Edition. Require: Each chapter about half of page Chapter 1 summary: Early histories of adult education grew out of the efforts of philanthropic thropic foundations and adult education associations, from the 1920s through the 1950s, to promote adult education as a new and distinct educational domain. Focusing on institutional development, ment, these histories illuminate the pervasiveness of educational activities for adults throughout American history and across American ican society. A full account would include education for subordinate nate groups, the uses of adult education through voluntary action, and the function of information systems in continuing adult learning. ing. We need to define adult education so that it can be identified as a distinct activity within preliterate American experience. Learning ing as a process of cultural transmission is reflected in the experience rience of Native Americans and the experience rience of Native Americans and the early settlers. Native American culture existed before European settlement, and it promoted the settlers' survival. Nevertheless, the lack of written ten documentation has encouraged denigration of Native American culture. Some contemporary European testimony to Indians' skills and knowledge base (aside from the evangelists' conviction that Indians could be educated in the Christian faith) has, however, come down to us. Today, there is a growing interest in preliterate societies and in oral history, but non-Native American historians are still constrained by questions of documentation. When English settlers arrived and proceeded to establish what were to become the thirteen colonies, the formative influences, essentially those of the (Protestant) English, reflected a growing shift from church to state in the nature and control of education. Colonial education was also associated with rank. Chapter 2 Summary: The colonial population was part of an Atlantic information network work serving literary, religious, and business purposes. This network work helped independent study and early scientific research. The network was enhanced by early colonial publications and by a growing number of bookstores. The Puritan commitment to salvation encouraged literacy, but with strictly conservative aims and methodology. New England's gland's literate white males had attitudes that proved very similar to the beliefs and attitudes proved very similar to the beliefs and attitudes of the illiterate, thus supporting the status quo. For some though, literacy helped them to be successful in a more secular and utilitarian world. Informal education influenced the literate and the illiterate, the prosperous and the poor, the free and the enslaved. The Puritan ministers had to contend with the influences of the taverns, coffee houses, theaters, town meetings, militia musters, and workplace: it was in these "schools for the people" that information was exchanged, changed, opinions heard and debated, and contacts often established lished with a wider world. Lectures in particular served the male and female members of "polite society," and a lecture circuit developed on the Eastern seaboard. Parish libraries reached a wider public, sometimes even Native Americans and African Americans. The "mutual improvement" ment" principle was evident in the voluntary societies that were initially an elite phenomenon, but which laid a foundation for more popular agencies. Chapter 3 Summary: Apprenticeship was the most pervasive form of colonial education. It provided for technical competence; moral and religious instruction; tion; and some reading, writing, and arithmetic. Its opportunities tended to be segregated in terms of gender, class, and race. Legal enforcement of the provisions was often uneven, and disputes were common. The system had the potential to offer substantial social and material advancement but was constrained by the desire to maintain the status quo. Evening schools proliferated in the seventeenth century, serving ing apprentices entitled to free instruction as well as men and women able to pay modest fees. The curriculum met liberal, vocational, tional, and leisure interests, and instructors were often day school teachers or practitioners. Most schools were private venture institutions, tions, necessarily responsive to changing needs and interests, but a few were sponsored institutions. The fee-paying institutions served a growing and competitive market and respected the dominant values and orthodoxies of that market. Some women benefited from such schools, as they did from public lectures, or the opportunities for independent study. Nevertheless, theless, even women fortunate enough to continue their education were constrained by a Puritan heritage of traditional female roles. Some managed to gain the skills and confidence to become schoolteachers, teachers, tutors, apprentice mistresses, or midwives and to manage the business or estate of an absent or deceased husband. Most women faced denigration of any intellectual aspirations that were independent of their husband or father (if they were unmarried). Minorities also found that their educational provision was circumscribed by their assigned social roles. The early colonists accepted an "obligation" to "civilize" the Indians, but lost enthusiasm siasm after several unsuccessful attempts. In the eighteenth century, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge funded both formal schooling and apprenticeship, but these foundered in the face of prejudice and indifference. Some black slaves arrived from Africa with valued skills, but their owners usually limited any subsequent education and training to those skills supportive of the plantation economy. While evangelizing was generally acceptable, reading, and especially writing, were matters of contention. Minority ity education, both of Indians and of African Americans, was constrained strained by such limitations as slavery, likely competition with white workers, and the fragmentation of denominational efforts. The real issue was not a question of how much or what type of education was provided, but why such education was provided: to keep minorities subservient in a society that was dominated by values which did not relate to them. Even then, few of the minorities who received that education managed to use it for their own social improvement. Chapter 4 summary With independence came the expectations of an enlightened citizenry zenry and of a cultural development that stressed practicality. Prevailing vailing aspirations revealed certain paradoxes. Race, gender, social class, and religion determined suitability for citizenship and for educational development. New England was the home of many reform campaigns, while in Virginia, the legislature rejected Jefferson's son's educational proposals. Frontier settlers, impressed with material rial progress, were to prove supportive of the innovations in adult education associated with the Jacksonian Revolution. Adult education promoters almost defy classification. They included old elites, new elites, upholders of the status quo, and challengers of the status quo. The voluntary associations channeled much of the enthusiasm, the more mainstream among them predictably ably committed to mainstream values. The associations as a whole promoted individual improvement, not wider social reform, and their ideals were accepted even by the utopian communities. They offered few prospects to poor citizens, women, and minorities. The physical sciences in particular were associated with these educational tional endeavors. Chapter 5 Summary Literacy was increasing, helped by cheap, popular reading materials rials in libraries and reading rooms. The American Bible Society and the American Tract Society published extensively, while colporteurs porteurs lectured to reinforce Protestantism. The benefits of literacy did not extend to illiterate slaves, who were not permitted to learn to read the Bible. Despite working farmers' skepticism of both "book learning" ing" and the success of elite farmers, agricultural societies promoted modern science. In the 1830s, a popular agricultural press developed, oped, and state grants helped agricultural innovation. For the next two decades, both agricultural societies and agricultural journals continued to increase, as did the pace of innovation. Small employers founded mechanics' and apprentices' libraries, ies, which collected "useful works" and "polite literature" and often admitted other family members. A social tension was sometimes times evident between artisan members and promoters from the business and professional classes. Mercantile libraries also developed, providing materials on business education as well as "polite literature" for young clerks and budding merchants. A public avowal of the "rags to riches" philosophy did not deter some established merchants from indifference ence or hostility toward these ventures. Despite substantial library growth in this period, no one city in the United States possessed adequate library facilities for independent, pendent, advanced scientific study. As William Ellery Charming and others praised lifelong independent dependent study, Horace Mann urged public library provision to make it possible. After several local ventures, Boston's 1852 public library succeeded in publicizing this movement. Later, various self-supporting supporting libraries progressed to municipal status. Voluntary agencies and religious groups such as the Quakers established evening schools for African-American and white students, dents, patterned after Thomas Pole's pioneer study of adult education tion principles. These schools aimed to instill dominant middle-class class values. By the 1840s, industrialization and increased immigration tion created a need for evening vocational and English language programs. By the Civil War, about a dozen public school systems were engaged in this work. Rejecting such projects, radicals sought to establish models for change in self-contained utopian communities. Here, adult education ucation might be used as an instrument to attain communal perfectibility. fectibility. After such noteworthy ventures as Robert Owen's 1825 experiment at New Harmony, Indiana, a host of others often proved short-lived, their heterogeneous membership unable to sustain the ambitious intellectual and physical goals of charismatic leaders. Chapter 6 Summary The mechanics' institutes sought to supplement the apprenticeship education of skilled workers and transform the workers into innovators vators and inventors who accepted the new industrial morality. Middle-class human and material resources were provided, assuming ing a community of interests and excluding controversial issues. Established from coast to coast, the institutes developed an information tion network that included overseas institutes. Necessarily experimental, the institutes soon realized the immensity mensity of their task, and labor increasingly challenged the assumed community of interests. As students sought a broader curriculum, economic viability suggested serving a broader public. Contemporaries raries saw some of the resultant innovations as an abandonment of high ideals. Only two institutes survive in the United States, but some of the pioneer libraries, museums, and evening class programs were bequeathed to public bodies. The lyceums sought to promote the public schools, and to provide an education program for the community in general. Some lyceums aimed to serve particular publics that were based on race, gender, religion, or occupation, but leadership remained largely in middle-class hands. A more widespread movement than the institutes, tutes, lyceums tended to have more informal and discursive programs, grams, while continuing to exclude controversial issues. Spreading from the Northeast to the South, to the Midwest, and ultimately to England, their vitality was essentially local in origin. Optimistic plans for county, state, national, and eventually an international organization proved largely impractical