DIE Zeitschrift für Erwachsenenbildung

Already Max Scheler developed a functional definition of education. With Scheler, education is not only not opposed to usefulness, but even prerequisite for reaching certain aims at all. In terms of the postmodernist media and mass society the relationship between education and usefulness has to be reformulated. With reference to Lyotard, the author develops a concept of education as a regulative idea. Under these conditions, individuals are not expected to integrate themselves culturally into society; a pluralistic cultural surplus is seen as sufficient.

The economy of education identifies various kinds of usefulness of education: individual benefits and also so-called external benefits, by which society profits (internal as well as external benefits can be monetary or non-monetary). These dimensions of usefulness differ in the degree to which they can be quantified. The benefits of education have not been researched as thoroughly as its cost. The more far-reaching welfare effects of further education are especially hard to measure. The evaluation of programmes and educational efforts in a work-related context will probably so far have drawn too rosy a picture of their efficiency.

Private individuals in Germany bear in some cases high costs individually and spend leisure time to a considerable extent for their professional further qualification. To what extent does the investment of money and time pay for course participants in further education? The author outlines how course participants estimate to which degree they benefit from their professional further education and how they judge the relationship of cost and effect. A high degree of satisfaction is found. However, a significant relationship exists between degree of satisfaction and certain important socio-demographic characteristics of the course participants.

Can the benefit derived from a course in further education be measured? Which methodological considerations are to be taken into account? It must be defined first of all which indicators are supposed to indicate the benefit. Evaluators and stakeholders must agree on set points. Data have to be collected using the methods of qualitative as well as quantitative research. Under evaluation aspects, anecdotic evidence has no value. At the end of the article, the author sums up four basic methods of calculation: evaluation of costs, of alternative costs, of benefit, or combinations of these.

With this article, the author (of the Institute of International Cooperation, an institution within the German Adult Education Association, IIZ/DVV) opens up a readers’ discussion in this publication on the subject of education and the EU extension. In his article, an overview of the points of discussion is given. After the breakdown of the socialist societies in the middle and Eastern European countries, educational facilities suffered a severe loss of authority. This has only partly been balanced by commercial educational institutions. Particularly for disadvantaged persons, access to education is still often hard to come by. In order to receive financial support for measures directed at disadvantaged groups, national providers must face the challenge of taking up internationally discussed subjects and guidelines – this, as well, being one dimension of the emergence of a European realm of life-long learning. This brings the author to a definition of the relationship of national and international paradigms of education – especially with regard to Germany.

For over 40 years, the „Bibliography of Adult Education” has been published. This service of the DIE (German Institute of Adult Education) has now been changed into a more modern online format. Looking back, the bibliography may well have been a little hampered by its aspiration to completeness, but it still has performed an essential role in making adult education an important discipline within educational science.