ADULT EDUCATION

In an effort to rectify the problems of increased dropout rates, the importance of adult education increased during the 1950s. The average American worker had not completed high school. In 1950 only 58.2 percent of all fifth-graders would eventually graduate from high school. At a time when science and mathematics were becoming a matter of national defense, improving the quality of the adult population became a priority.

Vocational and life-skills training comprised the most common courses and most effective solutions available. Those courses, offered in home economics, trade and industry, agriculture, and health-related fields, provided Americans with practical training for employment. The students who would have left school or those who had left school could now be educated for the employment they sought. And those students would also increase their annual incomes: skilled workers earned an average of two thousand dollars more per year than their unskilled counterparts. All levels of government funded the programs ($129 million in 1950; $228 million in 1959), with the bulk of resources coming from local government. People recognized that only through a better-trained and better-educated adult population could the country compete in the growing international market and defense spheres which would follow in the coming decades. Schools offered courses at night and on weekends for working adults. A new type of student—the non traditional student, as schools soon called them—became an important constituency for public schools.