ADULT EDUCATION POTENTIAL IN THE SOCIAL WORK

Abstract

Adult education is intended to expand the opportunities for an individual lifelong learning and to create conditions for its continuous self-improvement and mastering the complex of knowledge and skills necessary for an active life position expressed in effective professional and social activity. Adult education is considered as a resource of social work i.e. a kind of activity to assist the population various segments during a crisis period, which contributes to ensuring social peace and balance in society, preventing social conflicts, and neutralizing destabilizing factors. Adult education is one of the most effective ways of protecting human rights to a living decent standard, since it guarantees access to any level of the vocational education. Adult education performs a complex of social functions that ensure the new activity integrity or the qualitatively new level of previous activity: adaptive, informative, developmental, and compensatory. Accordingly, the following kinds of adult education are distinguished: additional or developing (satisfaction of the individual spiritual requests, the creative growth needs), compensatory (filling of gaps in basic education), adaptive (operational training and retraining in the conditions of constantly changing industrial and social situation), advanced. The adult education social functions are implemented through a network of formal education institutions (general secondary education in various forms, vocational and higher education, postgraduate education, advanced training and retraining) and non-formal adult education (professionally oriented and general cultural educational courses of various forms). Nowadays there are educational programs for adults addressed to socially vulnerable categories of citizens in Ukraine (refugees, unemployed, large families, disadvantaged adolescents) as well as other professional and social groups (teachers, students, etc.). Their thematic spectrum covers additional professional qualifications, social and civil competences development, human rights, problems of economy, politics, national culture, gender relations, ecology, etc.