From its beginnings the history of adult education has been entwined with the evolutionary struggle between labor and management for workplace control. The history of worker's education is, in reality, the history of two types of education--worker's education under worker's control and labor-management adult education under company control. Each has its own problems and limitations. Traditionally viewed as education for action rather than merely conveying academic information, worker's education has long been a practical method of building nad maintaining a strong and effective labor movement. There has been a marked lack of blue collar participation in both worker education and adult community education. The potential for adult education growth in the business and industrial sector is limited by several factors, including economic difficulties and the traditional conservative education objectives of the private sector. Adult education must abandon its perceived dualistic role as a provider of training for the productive sector of high technology and the treatment of the marginal adult. Rather, it must develop a new curricular approach with the goals of arriving at individual empowerment skills and a community and global consensus over issues of mutuality. (MN)