Adult education is so named not because it is confined to adults but because adulthood defines its limits. As a process, adult education revolves around nonvocational ideals. Its approach is via the route of situations rather than subjects. Adult education attempts to discover new methods and create new incentive for learning. It attempts to serve as a means of keeping adults' minds fresh to assimilate that knowledge which is synonymous with power. Vocational education is designed to equip students with the proper means for arriving at their selected goals, whereas adult education goes beyond the means and demands new sanctions and vindications of ends. It helps adults gain the knowledge about their powers, capacities, and limitations that is necessary to gain true freedom and to sustain/rekindle their creative spark throughout their lives. Adult education helps spawn new cultural values and helps adults appreciate what is around them. In an age of specialism, adult education helps adults understand their relationship to the whole. Adult education supplies directive energy for collective enterprises, is an agitating instrument for changing life, and recognizes that knowledge comes from experience. (Contains 28 references.) (MN)