Understanding How Adult Education Can Benefit You
The teaching of adults differs considerably from children because of the background knowledge of students and the fact that they are usually eager to learn of their own accord, instead of it being mandatory to be taught. Indeed, there are times when parents do not relate to their children: they own and possess them. Emotionally unavailable for the nurturing love their children most needed, these parents were unable to augment their offspring’s development from child to adulthood.
Many of these adults who were dropouts from the schools in their childhood yearn to continue their education at a later and more convenient time. Cermak, Timmin L,, M.D. “A Time to Heal: The Road to Recovery for Adult Children of Alcoholics.” Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1988.
There is a saying that is very popular, and can apply to many different situations: “better late than never.” Many adults have realized the importance and necessity of education and have come forward to enroll themselves in the many adult education programs available.
If you are working and have a high school diploma, you may want to consider enhancing your skills by taking additional education classes. Although an adult child can distance himself from his past in time, he cannot necessarily do so in effect. Thus in need and anticipation of praise and affirmations from parents who cannot provide them, adult children usually feel as if they pull into the gas station with an almost empty tank only to find that the pump is broken.
Fluency Instruction In Adults
They used to be referred to as “non-traditional students,” but adult students are the fastest growing group pursuing a college education. There are lots of reasons for adults to return to education after some time. These educational programs are organized by both government as well as voluntary institutions. But the adults are principally bread winners; in their case education is secondary in importance.
Typical adult education centres offer the opportunity for students who have not completed their schooling to continue and aim for an equivalent achievement (such as a GED in the US), or they may well be adjoined to a university or college with the offer of Foundation courses, A-Levels, or Degrees in the UK.
Controlling others later in life, yet another adult child manifestation, is an attempt to create the delusion of safety and stability as the more dominant figure. Although releasing and reprocessing feelings may pull the adult child’s plug on his past later in life if he can surmount his wall of denial, he may find this an insurmountable obstacle.
Education
Adult education gives high quality education for adults to improve their standard in the society, and it can be continued at any stage of their life. The folkbildning approach, as well as the folk high schools established in Norway, Sweden, and Germany vary amongst themselves, but are all similar in that students aren’t graded nor do they have any exams. The child’s individuality, autonomy, personality, and sense of self are progressively eroded until he becomes a debilitated appendage of that parent.
Continuing education in the field of business and finance is now being made available to those who may not be in a position to physically attend classes at an institution of higher learning. However, this online medical reference is for educational purposes only, and is not meant to substitute the advice of a medical professional.
Many adult children of alcoholics, even some of those in deep denial, are aware of a strange split within themselves between how competent they may look on the outside and how much of a loss they feel internally. There is great difference between the education of children and the education of adults.
Distance Learning
There is more emphasis on lifelong learning and adult education these days. Through the use of the Internet, many universities have programs that offer students the opportunity to participate in business classes from home or some other place where they have access to a computer and sometimes a television monitor. Interrupting, like static, the neuron connections that otherwise enable people to evoke positive feelings and empathy for the harm their detrimental actions may cause, they are unable to generate either for their children.
Often criticized, and ultimately internalizing negative self-feelings and beliefs because of it, adult children judge themselves harshly and without mercy-yet another manifestation-replaying the same critical parent tapes later in life and failing to acknowledge their positive qualities and strengths.
Scholarships
Adult education helps adults by offering education of high standards in various forms. Because of blurred parent-child boundaries, the subconscious absorption of projected, negatively charged emotions, and the infection of transferred alcoholic toxins, the person is forced to become intertwined, becoming codependent or “dependent with” his parent, just as the parent himself is dependent upon liquor or other substances.
Even when intellect indicates a meritorious action or exemplary accomplishment, engulfing emotion will invariable drown it. Having served as the reflection of their parents’ deficiencies and the object of their inferior feelings and hatred, they can hardly believe in themselves.
Children are principally students. And, as many adult children of alcoholics know only too well, we cannot escape our families simply by creating physical or emotional distance.