The right of adults to education: A comparative analysis from the Portuguese and Italian policy agenda

The subject of this article is the right to education of adults with a focus on the critical analysis of education policy. We discuss human rights as a framework for citizenship in two national contexts of Southern Europe with the purpose of underlining key differences and similarities in countries with diverse histories but a similar high number of low qualified adults among their population. This paper provides a detailed historical context for adult education policy in those countries and expounds on how current Portuguese and Italian educational policy agendas have considered the right to education of adults in the context of their democratic regimes. For critical analysis we use Tomaševski’s (2001) theoretical 4A framework, built mainly for school contexts, and apply it to adult education policy. The objective is to understand ways of realizing the right to education of adults by means of policy measures undertaken by governments in those national states. Thus, we employed as an object of analysis the study of availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability of Adult Education and Learning (ALE) against the backdrop of current changes occurring in Europe. This heuristic exercise makes a significant contribution to adult education literature in times of neoliberal trends.