EN
The article presents the typology of different concepts of adulthood used in adult education research. Most of them were created in the 1960’s and the 1970’s when adult education system was based on formal teaching offered by the educational institutions. Now we observe how postmodernity has revised the concept of adulthood. The idea of lifelong learning emphasizes the processes of natural learning situated in people’s lifeworlds. Accordingly, the term “adulthood” has lost its cognitive status and it has been replaced by the category “personal experience”.