The unknown story: vocational education for adults in Sweden 1918-1968

The concept ‘adult education’ is usually restricted to organisations where the cultural and societal development of the participants is emphasised. The title of this paper suggests that vocational education and training, too, has been important in adult education. In this paper, the opportunities for adults in Sweden in vocational education and training in the period 1918-1968 are explored with a focus on vocational schools. It demonstrates that adults, rather than minors, took advantage of different possibilities in vocational education and training and that this was an important educational option to adults. It provided hundreds of thousands of adults with skills and competencies for the labour market as well as with general education. Since the system for vocational education and training was similar in most European countries in this period, the results in this paper suggest that vocational education was an important form of adult education also in other countries.