Although it has been a major priority of the Soviet government since 1917, when the Bolsheviks initiated a mass literacy campaign, adult education in the USSR has received comparatively little attention from Western scholars. This book is the first Western account of the people's universities--the decentralized, nonformal arms of the vast Soviet system of continuing education. Based on the only on-site studies thus far conducted by a Westerner, it focuses on the ideological, institutional, and pedagogical dimensions of the system and assesses its goals, methods, and achievements in terms...