The History of Adult Education in the United States

Abstract

James Truslow Adams in his recently published study2 of adult education in the United States holds that, coincident with the landings of the white man on the North American coast at Jamestown in 1607 and at Plymouth in 1620, his adult education began. If learning by living and through experience constitutes adult education-and there is ample evidence to support the belief-then indeed is Dr. Adams' thesis correct, for it was a hard and bitter school of experience indeed that opened in that far off day for the new and untried settlers in a bleak and unknown wilderness. But if American adult education started at that moment for the white man, it had started far earlier in this country for the red Indian, who of course had been faced with the same perils' and hardships encountered in the same hard school of experience for no one can say how many hundreds of years previously. And for another group of American citizens, brought far later to the American shores under conditions of cruelty and hardship, the bitter school of experience likewise opened its doors but this time under the intolerable conditions attending human slavery. The African Negro, become an American slave, had to learn through experience and at once