Applied Black Studies: Adult Education in the Black Community--A Case Study

Abstract

By virtue of size, structure, and influence, the university has the capacity to respond to a very broad constituency. Traditionally, however, the university has perceived its audience in rather narrow terms. Historically, it catered to an elite or potential elite, seeking to educate a leadership and intellectual class. From World War I to the end of World War II the expansion and specialization of knowledge meant that universities reached out to develop a new middle class. Universities were responding to the acceleration of new knowledge, especially in the physical, natural, and social sciences. People were being educated to assume professional and managerial roles, then upper middle-class positions. During the late 1950s, Sputnik pressures influenced the university to broaden its student body by including talented individuals from the lower middle class and working class who might be trained in science, mathematics, and engineering-needed fields to be staffed to compete with the Russian threat to excel in space exploration. The continued growth of science and technology since that time has resulted in proliferation of occupations requiring certification and credentialization.1 Further, as an outcome of political upheavals and social protest movements in the 1960s, the university was forced again to