DIE Zeitschrift für Erwachsenenbildung

Large parts of adult education are not being reached through relevant laws at all anymore. Thus a factual deregulation is the consequence. This loss of scope faces a growing provision profundity of those laws thar are tangent to the adult education area and that have been revised lately. The author draws attention to this ambivalent context by means of the most important legal basis of adult education: the adult education laws of the German states and the social statute book III (SGB III).

The European Union has only a subsidiary educational assignment. Hence ist does not astonish that there are no ordinance and guidelines for the educational area to be found in the joint primary law. Certainly there are primary laws coming out from other political fields which are tangent to education. Essentially the European Union helps itself to soft legislative provision such as decisions concerning support programmes, recommendations, statements or communiques. Within the framework of the method of the "open coordination" indeed considerable and increasing pressure can be put upon national politics.

The contribution summarizes occasion, assignment, object, procedure and results of the evaluation of the North Rhine-Westphalian law of adult education. Thereby it also includes following statements of clients an association. Going out from this it tries to find answers to general questions concerning the evaluation of adult education laws. For the question of objectivity of analyses and results the disclosure of the targets and the independence of researcher teams are vital.

The author certifies the integration courses for immigrants, which were launched at the beginning of this year, a false start. The responsible Federal Agency allegedly operates with delusive numbers of started courses; the approval procedures are supposed to be too lengthy and the implementation for the sponsor of language courses is allegedly unprofitable. This is supposed to apply intensified to the 30 hour long orientation course, where hardly any direct payers can be expected. Especially the basis of calculation on which the sponsor acts, leads to a lowering of fees of the course instructors which stands in contradiction to the by law demanded quality of staff.

Complaints about the governmental withdrawal from public responsibility for adult education are most common nowadays. The "retrospects" shows how the perception of public responsibility during the last three decades of the 20th century has changed in the mirror of different political guidelines and an altering public interest in adult education.

The "learning time account" links the politics of working hours with professional adult education. As a derivative from the "working hours account" it represents an instrument with which the worked for time demands of the employee is changed into adult education instead of into money. Depending on whether the adult education serves work related or private matters, the resources are made available by the employer or by the employee (time and money). In the discussion of lifelong learning the instrument was foremost brought forward distinctively by the suggestions of the Expert Commission on Financing Lifelong Learning. It is expecting a higher participation rate of work related adult education due to a wider dissemination collectively. The authors introduce the concept, include experiences with the implementation and suggest a connection of learning time accounts with educational leave demands.