Drawing on critical theory for adult education, the authors of this article examine the Academic Credit Bank System (ACBS), an open educational system operating in the Republic of Korea since 1998. It was designed to provide both traditional-age and mature students with opportunities to earn academic qualifications, including Bachelor's degrees,…

Six generations ago, my Celtic forebears came to Australia as convicts and invaders displacing Indigenous peoples. As a scholar today, I am interested in how Indigenous knowledge remains a challenge in Australian Universities even in this postmodern and postcolonial moment. This paper recognises the need to extend discussion about how Indigenous…

In recent years, nontraditional workforce training programs have proliferated inside and outside of traditional postsecondary institutions. A subset of these programs, bootcamps, advertise high job placement rates and have been hailed by policymakers as key to training skilled workers. However, few formal data exist on the number, types, prices,…

Located differentially (and to its detriment) within a status hierarchy of knowledge, vocational education has been called upon to satisfy an increasing range of political and social needs, including meeting the needs of industry and government and catering for increasing pupil diversity. Faced with stubbornly immobile rates of school completion…

The Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) is a very successful senior secondary school qualification introduced in the Australian state of Victoria in 2002. Applied learning in the VCAL engages senior students in a combination of work-based learning, service-learning, and project-based learning and aims to provide them with the skills,…

Through a case study of an adult literacy program (MOBRAL) in a Brazilian community, the author examines the hypothesis that schooling promotes membership in social institutions, as measured by document acquisition, for schooling requires and generates social documents (birth certificates, diplomas) and encourages acquisition of others (identity…

In 1989, 682,728 people (7% less than in 1988) took the Tests of General Educational Development (GED Tests). Approximately 68% earned scores sufficient to qualify for the GED diploma awarded by their jurisdictions. Departments and ministries of education in the United States and Canada awarded 376,879 credentials (down 13% from 1988) based on GED…