1. education on microenterprise development so youth and adults can learn how to become entrepreneurs and work towards economic self-sufficiency;
2. job skills training so that displaced workers in unskilled jobs can be efficiently cross-trained into better paying jobs that do not suffer from outsourcing;
3. financial literacy so that once employment at a self-sufficiency level is achieved adults can be better consumers in various domains and manage their money better so they can begin to invest in wealth accrual,
4. health literacy so that individuals and families can take better care of themselves and access affordable, competent medical care;
5. workplace literacy so that employed and under employed workers can acquire skills for upward mobility or transfer into better paying jobs.

Why is FCE important for youth and adult education? Unlike children, who tend to do things to please their parents or teachers, youth and adults will usually want to understand the functional utility of investing time and mental energy in learning something. With respect to out-of-school youth and adults then, FCE focuses on improving

(1) Participation in adult education programs by making explicit the relationship between what students want to learn, what is being taught and its application in the contexts that the person will be functioning in after the educational program, this promotes increased motivation;

(2) Achievement in learning and transfer by ensuring that instruction relates to the learner's prior knowledge in such a way that the learner can function within the learning situation and improving transfer by deriving instructional contents as much as possible from the future contexts in which the person will apply the learning, and

(3) Prevention of learning problems in future generations by designing youth and adult programs that maximize the intergenerational transfer of the adults' new skills and attitudes about education to their children.

Functional Context Education Principles and Practices: Three Online Resources

The concepts of Functional Context Education are being more widely disseminated on the internet. Three online resources provide a wide range of resources for adult educators and others and include information about Functional Context Education theory and principles for embedding or integrating basic skills with content subject matter.

1. Encyclopedia of Psychology

The Encyclopedia of Psychology facilitates browsing in psychology. There are two paths for this purpose, one providing original information generated by respected researchers and practitioners in various fields of psychology and the other providing a hierarchical database of links to web sites providing information about scientific psychology. The site aims to create a set of links that represent the best available sites organized in a manner that furthers the understanding of Psychology as a science.

An entry in the Encyclopedia of Psychology about FCE can be found at http://www.psychology.org/links/Environment_Behavior_Relationships/Education/

It includes an Overview of FCE stating (abridged here):