Many service-providers, particularly teachers and administrators who are directly responsible for adult basic education programs/have received little or no training in adult education techniques. Often, their lack of awareness of the development and learning principles related specifically to adults and of how best to apply these in a wide variety of situations means that their efforts and good intentions miss the mark and the learner is not helped and often hindered.

The (A.B.E.) program (in the U.S.A.) is scandalously under professionalized. More than a decade after the enactment of the Adult Education Act ... teachers are still simply moonlighters. They are usually trained only to teach children. Most A.B.E. teachers are lucky if they have attended a three-day workshop on adult education. Most administrators - - even of major programs - - have never attended any instructional session on adult learning or education and know very little about the field. They are simply school men (and women) temporarily assigned to shape up a new program. By and large, adult education as andragogy - - with its distinctive ideology, mission and methodology based upon the unique educational needs of adults - - has been reduced by A.B.E. to mean teaching adults as you teach children, except more politely.

We have no solid core of adult educators able in helping adults become self-directed learners, increasingly able to define their own learning needs and to plan, conduct and evaluate their own learning experiences. Instead we have the educator as outpatient clinician - - testing, diagnosing, prescribing. The learner is simply presented with a series of programmed assignments, much like a doctor's prescription, to guide self-instruction.

... I am more alarmed by the andragogical illiteracy among educators charged with A.B.E. than I am by the magnitude of the need for A.B.E. in this country.(1)