IV

The agencies responsible for China's adult education include various ministries or commissions under the State Council, educational departments of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, business or industrial departments at different levels, such as machinery electronics, light industry, coal-mining, metallurgy, railways, communication, agriculture and forestry. They can be units of factories, mines of enterprises or local governments at county, township levels. In cooperation with educational departments, trade unions, Chinese Communist Youth League, women's federations at different levels jointly run schools for advanced studies, training for the respective trades or local areas. Democratic parties, social, people's and academic organizations, collective economic entities and individual citizens can also set up institutions of adult education, by offering remedial or tutorial courses of cultural studies, classes of vocational and technical education or courses on social, cultural life.

Adult schools usually consist of the following: education radio and television universities, institutions of higher learning for workers and peasants, colleges for management personnel, education institutes, independent correspondence colleges, adult education offered by regular institutions higher education (departments of correspondence, evening universities, advanced training for teachers), TV education via satellite as well as the system of examinations for self-taught students at higher level. Slementarg Intermedial adult education can also be conducted places like secondary professional training schools, for adults secondary professional training schools, for adults secondary professional training classes for workers or cadres by regular secondary profossional training schools, adult middle schools, technical schools for peasants, agricultural schools of radio and television as well as self-taught examination system at secondary level. Various schools are in existence for advanced studies, training, correspondence or face-to-face tutorial lecture. The above mentioned schools or establishment (provide for adult learners different forms of studies: full-time classroom lectures, self-study with the help of provided teaching materials, audio/visual data distance tutoring. Some pursue their studies on a full-time or part-time basis, or in their spare time. These schools or establishments as regards to the social needs and their consideration of facilities available, offer a lot of specialities in liberal arts, basic sciences, engineering, agriculture, medicine, finance and economics, political science and law, pedagogy and physical education. Teaching contents are made available to the actual needs of learners in possible way on the condition that academic education standard can be guaranteed. The best example in this regard is education for peasants, that is, adult education in rural areas developed from merely learning to read or acquire knowledge to a training system in which there is an integration of cultural knowledge with knowledge of agriculture, forestry, side-products, fishery as well as township industry, commerce, architecture, transportation and service which are required by the development of production.

Specifications of running schools include both academic and non education. Academic education includes studies of undergraduate programmes, two-year college, secondary specialized schools and middle schools. Non-academic education is defined as those programmes for literacy, training of rural practical skills, single-subject qualification certificates, professional certificates and post-college further education.