The Piagetian perspective of adult cognitive development and adult education could have implications for how work and formal reasoning can be related to adult education programs and policy. During adolescence and adulthood, many individuals enter the cognitive period of formal operations (the last of three stages in Piaget's conceptual framework of cognitive development) and thus become able to think in a hypothetico-deductive manner, to discern proportionalities, and to generate all the combinations among factors in a systematic manner. However, research has established that formal reasoning tends to occur solely in modern technological societies and only among 30% of the adults in those populations. Formal reasoning becomes especially important in a complex democracy such as America, because ideally citizens should be independent decisionmakers capable of assessing complicated issues affecting the country. Related to that is the issue that some forms of work encourage and support formal reasoning skills and other forms of work depress or inhibit formal reasoning development. Consequently, one function of adult education can then be to foster the development of formal reasoning among adults either in building on positive cognitive effects of some career experiences or in counteracting negative cognitive effects of other work experiences. (SH)