Founded in March 1872, the Wiesbadener Volksbildungsverein, a branch of the Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung (Society for the Dissemination of Popular Education), which had been founded in Berlin the previous year with the significant involvement of the Biebrich factory owner Friedrich (Fritz) Kalle, was completely under the spell of the nationalist, supremacist idea of popular education after the foundation of the German Reich in 1871. In its annual report for 1896/97, it postulated the primary task of "increasing the earning capacity of the less well-off through appropriate instruction and promoting the spiritual and moral upliftment of the people".

Since 1901, the association's statutes have aimed to "promote the education of the broad sections of the population in order to enable them to a greater extent to fulfill their duties in the state, community and society". To this end, public libraries, a public reading hall and children's reading halls were set up, lectures and public lectures were organized and public entertainment evenings were held.

As early as 1873, the association had set up a further education school for girls, which it maintained until the city opened a commercial further education school for both sexes in 1901. This was followed by a mending and sewing school in 1887 and a cookery school for a few years from 1890. From 1900, the Volksbildungsverein published the Wiesbadener Volksbücher.

In addition to the wide range of educational programs offered by the Volksbildungsverein, there were also student folk education courses before the First World War. Initially, these classes were taught by students during their vacations. They felt obliged to "benefit the community in their own way and help the up-and-coming classes", as the announcement of the second course in the fall of 1910 stated. The aim was to "renew, expand, supplement and deepen elementary school knowledge among the manual laboring classes". This student evening school was incorporated into the Wiesbaden Adult Education Center as a department in October 1922.

Although the Wiesbadener Volksbildungsverein always emphasized its political neutrality, the literature and periodicals that were made available in the public libraries and public reading halls operated by it did not include works and periodicals from the workers' movement. A similar picture emerges from an examination of the Wiesbaden Volksbücher. Although there were certainly individual works by democratically-minded authors, including Heinrich Heine, for example, the vast majority of titles stood for a German nationalist program, such as the books by Prof. Ernst Moritz Arndt and Prof. Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl. The eight winter events "Von deutscher Art und Seele" in 1932/33 were characteristic of the association's political orientation, as was the event held in the Kurhaus on October 9, 1932 to celebrate its 60th anniversary. This was the best-attended event in the association's history and even had to be repeated due to excessive demand.

The Volksbildungsverein was also affected by the Nazi Gleichschaltung of 1933. Its lending libraries were closed in the late summer of 1934 and their stock was transferred to the city of Wiesbaden. Only the Volkslesehalle on Boseplatz remained until the association was dissolved in February 1936.