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Concepts and practicesof education and adulteducation: obstacles tolifelong education andlifelong learning?Colin TitmusPublished online: 11 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Colin Titmus (1999) Concepts and practices ofeducation and adult education: obstacles to lifelong education and lifelonglearning?, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 18:5, 343-354, DOI:10.1080/026013799293595

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LIFELONG EDUCATION, VOL. 18, NO. 5 (SEPT.± OCT. 1999), 343± 354

Concepts and practices of education and adulteducation: obstacles to lifelong education andlifelong learning?

COLIN TITMUS

Over the last half century, in varying degrees and under various names, there has been muchinterest in learning throughout life for everybody. Although what has been written has stressedits necessity and feasibility, little has been achieved. As is common to all things educational, it haslagged behind the times. Little considered and highly resistant among the obstacles to it are thecurrent concepts, institutions and practices of education. The widespread, systematic study ofeducation in the 19th century grew out of the need to train teachers required by the introductionof universal primary schooling. Concentration by teacher trainers on this task, and their struggleto establish their subject as a coherent discipline to be taught in institutions of higher educationwas such that the prevailing view of education came to be restricted not merely mainly, ashitherto, but only, to the upbringing of children and young people. Rejecting this view ofnecessity, adult educationalists have sought for their own ® eld academic recognition as adiscipline, emphasizing their diŒerences from initial education. Study of current educationalwritings from many countries shows that the reconciliation of these two positions, necessary tolifelong education, has not gone very far. Consideration of what might be done to create a processand a habit of lifelong learning for all on the basis of current practice and theory of initialeducation and adult education, of which lifelong education can only be a contributory element,will require fundamental changes in both. There are few signs so far of the political will and thesense of urgency that will apparently be required.

The ideals enshrined in the terms lifelong education or lifelong learning have been muchbandied about again in the 1990s and, if one is to believe Unesco, governments are inagreement that it should be an immediate goal of policy. At least governments of theFirst World are, and those of the Third World would like to be, if they had the resources.It would be easier to assess this goal if one had a clearer understanding of what theexpressions meant, and what would be required of any attempts to put them intopractice. For it must be recognized that Ettore Gelpi’ s point, made in 1984, that therehas been little advance towards their ` operationalization ’ , remains valid (Gelpi 1984:79± 87).

In the 1960s and 1970s much stress was laid on the need for what in North Americais often called ` learning over the lifespan’ and there was much talk. Various names weregiven to strategies which, it was believed, would get somewhere near it ± permanent

Colin T itmus worked in university adult education for over thirty years. A specialist in comparative adulteducation, he has lectured on the subject in a number of countries and has served as a consultant for Unesco,OECD and the Council of Europe. His publications include Adult Education in France (1967), Strategies for AdultEducation: Practises in Western Europe (1981), Continuing Education in Higher Education (1993), with Joachim H.Knoll and Ju$ rgen Wittpoth, Adult Education for Independence (1995), with Tom Steele. He edited LifelongEducation for Adults, an International Handbook (1989) and was Chief Editor of The Unesco T erminology of AdultEducation (1979).

International Journal of Lifelong EducationISSN 0260± 1370 print} ISSN 1464 ± 519X online # 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp:} } www.tandf.co.uk} JNLS} led.htm http:} } www.taylorandfrancis.com} JNLS} led.htm

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education, continuing education, recurrent education, for example (Lengrand 1970,Council of Europe 1970, Club of Rome 1979). In the 1980s the subject fell out of fashion.When it was discussed, the favoured term was ` lifelongeducation ’ or ` lifelong learning ’ .With a looseness that has marked educational terminology throughout its history, thelatter term was, and still is, frequently treated as a synonym of the former. Someclari® cation of concepts and terminology has taken place, but it is by no meanscomplete. Because it carried the implication of lifelong schooling, ` lifelong education ’was increasingly derided as impractical and undesirable. It is becoming more frequentlyde® ned as ` a set of organizational, administrative, methodological measures (Knapperand Cropley 1985: 18), which facilitateand encourage lifelong learning, a more realisticaim. That perception of both lifelong education and lifelong learning remainsinadequate, however, because in both cases their scope would be limited to actionsundertaken speci® cally to bring about learning. As I shall suggest, it is increasinglydi� cult in contemporary conditions to justify the exclusion from consideration oflearning acquired as a by-product, not intended and often unconscious, of everydayexperience; it is important to maximize such learning.

Most of the writing on the subject is very upbeat, not surprisingly, since much of ithas been commissioned by governments (Dohmen 1996), or aimed at in¯ uencing themto implement it (Delors 1996). The emphasis tends to be laid on the need for it, theunparalleled opportunities that new organization, new methods and new technical aidsoŒer, the advantages for the economy, for democracy, for the self-realization ofindividuals, that will accrue. Some changes will be required to existing concepts andpractices of education, granted, but these are underplayed. If the political will exists (touse a hallowed caveat of our time), they should not be too di� cult. Of course, sincelifelong learning and lifelong education are needed now, some speed of implementation,to a degree hitherto unknown, will be required.

If by twitching one’ s nose, like a character in a once-popular television programme,one could be transported instantly and painlessly to where one wished to go, then mostpeople would be in favour of achieving that goal. There is, however, little evidence thatit will be easy, it will provoke a major disturbance, political will or not, to attempt it onthe global scale and at the pace required. Even a cursory reading of the relevantliterature supports this view. Education is now a massive social institution. Few peoplebelieve that universal lifelong learning, on the level needed, will be possible without anadequate basis of education. Institutions so ® rmly established have a rigidity whichmake them exceedingly di� cult and, in a democratic system, slow to change. Thestability, from which they derive their strength, has become a weakness. Already, in1979, it was the opinion of the Club of Rome that the major human dilemmathreatening our future was the failure of our learning to keep pace with the currentproblems of society (Club of Rome 1979). Karl Popper’ s dictum about political systems,that they can only be changed piecemeal, could equally be applied to education. Itwould be easy, if unacceptable, if one could wipe away the past and the present, to beginagain on a clean slate. Some have tried it, in the USSR and China, for example, but ithas not worked. It would, perhaps, simplify matters, if social and cultural innovationcould merely be superimposed on what already exists, but what actually happens is aninteraction with it and that is much more complex. It is a weakness of those who writeto promote lifelong education for the necessary lifelong learning that they tend tounderplay the di� culties posed by the existing concepts and practice of education.

These are sometimes frankly acknowledged, although not dwelt upon. The report,Learning: the T reasure Within, commissioned by Unesco, draws attention brie¯ y to one:

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¼ we must stop regarding the diŒerent forms of teaching and learning asindependent from one another and, in a sense, as superimposable or evencompeting; we must try, on the contrary, to enhance the complementarycharacter of the stages of modern education and the environments where it isprovided. (Delors 1996: 100)

The present article is written to draw attention to the widespread, if not general, failureto perceive or practise complementarity between what are seen as the two major stages,education and adult education, as they exist today. In the ® rst part of this essay I use theterm, education, rather than the more appropriate expression, initial education,because the former expresses more accurately how it is perceived and practised, bysponsors, providers, scholars and learners. It is an enduring product of history.

Widespread, systematic study of education was a product of the introduction ofuniversal, compulsory primary schooling in the 19th century. Secondary and highereducation teachers owed their professional status to their knowledge of the subjects theytaught, rather than their pedagogic quali® cations. In most cases they had none. Thehordes of new primary teachers neither had nor needed advanced subject knowledge.What they required, both to carry out their job and lay claim to professional status, wasa practical and, to a lesser degree, theoretical mastery of pedagogy. The trainingcolleges, which sprang up to provide it, became also centres of study to provide theknowledge, hitherto neglected, which they needed. Growing recognition of theimportance of the process as well as the content of education, together with its increasingclaim to academic respectability for the study of it, won it a toehold in universities andattracted some notable scholars. E! mile Durkheim was Professor of Pedagogy at theSorbonne and Jean Piaget Director of the Institut des Sciences de l ’ EU ducation in Geneva.Because the expansion of educational studies was so closely identi® ed with the needs ofuniversal schooling, those engaged concentrated attention on childhood. There wasnothing new in this, childhood has usually been treated as the main age of education± but not the only one. An acknowledged place has been left for post-childhoodeducation. Not, however, this time. So focused did departments of education become,that only schooling and higher education came to be considered as education at all.Durkheim, for example, reserved the term to mean the in¯ uence exercised by adultgenerations on those not yet ready for social life, in other words the methodicalsocializationof the young, as he put it (Durkheim 1922, 1956). He was not alone. In sucha concept there was no place for adult education, except as provision of compensatoryinstruction for teaching foregone for one reason or another in childhood.

Up to World War II, it did not seem to matter to adult educators. Theywere more concerned with doing rather than thinking about the theory behind whatthey did. No doubt the fact that, for most of them, the education of adults was avoluntary, or at least a part-time, activity had much to do with it. They had neither thetime nor resources, made available to schooling by the state. In any case, rejection of theformal education system as incapable of meeting the needs of the working massesremained a potent force in some of the countries where education of adults wasstrongest. In Denmark Grundtvig had condemned ` the spiritless cramming and rote-learning of existing boys’ schools ’ (Rù rdam 1965: 13). In Germany in the 1920sattempts to create links between universities and Volksbildung failed as much because ofthe opposition of elements of the latter movement to academic scholarship (Titmus,Knoll and Wittpoth1993: 77± 78)as reluctance by the former, an attitude shared by theScandinavian countries. The eU ducation populaire movement put much of the blame for the

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French defeat by Germany in 1940 on the inadequacies of the formal education system(Titmus 1981 : 137). There was a strong tradition of unwillingness among adulteducators to submit to the hegemony of the state, even in the English-speakingcountries, which, for historical and constitutional reasons, had less to fear from it.Authoritarian states, for their part, had good historical reasons to be wary of adulteducation. Whereas the goal of schooling was to ® t children into society as it was, thegoal of much education of adults was to change it.

Since World War II the education of adults has been neither willing nor able toignore its isolation from conventional education, that is, schooling. But it has acceptedit, even emphasized it in its growing attempts to establish its separate identity and itsclaim to equal status with schooling. Its progress to acceptance as a global socialphenomenon began, as it has continued, largely under the aegis of Unesco. At the ® rstInternational Conference on Adult Education, held in Elsinore, Denmark, in 1949,dominated by Western European and North American countries, a distinctly pre-1939view prevailed (UNESCO 1949). Adult education was seen from the point of view of theadvanced countries, which had won World War II (the USSR was not represented). Itmeant liberal education, to the exclusion of the vocational. The role of voluntaryorganizations was stressed, that of governments underplayed. What had had somejusti® cation in some 19th century industrial states, however, could not be maintained inthe 20th century, when education for adults spread throughout the world. By 1976 theterm, ` adult education ’ , it was agreed by UNESCO, denoted

¼ the entire body of organized educational processes, whatever the content, leveland method, whether formal or otherwise, or whether they prolong or replaceinitial education, in schools, colleges and universities,as well as an apprenticeship,whereby persons regarded as adult by the society to which they belong developtheir abilities, enrich their knowledge, improve their technical or professionalquali® cations, or turn them in a new direction and bring about changes in theirattitudes or behaviour in the two-fold perspective of full personal developmentand participation in balanced and independent social, economic and culturaldevelopment (UNESCO 1976: ch. 1).

In the years immediately following World War II experiences of Fascism andNazism made education for citizenship a priority. In some states, Federal Germany andAustria for example, it was enshrined in law, although adults soon got bored with that,particularly in the USSR, where it was compulsory. Equity demanded that, followingthe spread of secondary schooling, adults should have similar opportunities ± later, thatthey should be oŒered access to higher education, even though they had not theconventional entry quali® cations. Rapid and continuing technical advances madenecessary updating of knowledge and skills during working life, to the extent that insome professions it became a condition of retaining one’ s licence to practise. Provisionbecame directed at more speci® c publics ± at parents, at the elderly, at women, atimmigrants, at the unemployed, for example. Large-scale attempts were made to meetthe needs of the Third World, through health and population education, andparticularly literacy programmes, which were found to be increasingly necessary inadvanced countries too. Voluntary providers have continued to play a signi® cant role.In some states, it was guaranteed by law. However, NGOs (Non-Governmenta lOrganizations), to use the UNESCO term, by their dependence on governmental® nancial support, no longer have the freedom of action they enjoyed, when the statetook a lesser interest.

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Like those of schooling a century before, teaching and organization of education foradults have become increasingly professionalized. To achieve status as a profession,adult education has been obliged to claim and to attempt to develop a coherent bodyof knowledge unique to itself, on which to base the training of adult educators and tojustify the toehold it has sought as a subject to be taught in higher education. The globalstatus and responsibility of Western adult education was maintained, if not increased,by the role universities in Europe and North America were called upon to play as centresfor the education of adult educators from the Third World.

Signi® cant advances in knowledge of practice and theory have been made.Unfortunately there exists a serious gap between the actual practice of education foradults and the desiderata for action, which studies in adult education, the concept, haveled us to propose. If the distinctive characteristics, psycho-physical and social, of adults,on which claims for the uniqueness and coherence of adult education are based, thanone might expect them to be taken into account in all organized education for adults,or even shaped entirely by them. It has not happened. The education of adults has beenforced to ® t itself into a temporal and function space, which was already occupied, or forwhich it was challenged by other categories of education with a stronger claim on theloyalty of sponsors, providers and learners.

I have used the term, function space, somewhat loosely, to cover the range of levels,kinds and purposes over which education spreads. Much of the territory at the level ofpost-compulsory education is occupied by higher education, which has its own identity,ethos and practices. It is they, rather than those of adult education, which, in the eyesof both institutions and students, should rule the increasing number of individuals,recognized as fully adult, who enter that part of the territory, whatever their age maybe. The perception that they are higher education students in¯ uences their learning andthe way they are taught more strongly than the consciousness that they are adults. Inthe sector called workers’ education, it is the concept of common socio-economic statusembodied in the term ` worker ’ , which determines what and how things are done, nota common age group. Philip Hopkins, in his book on the subject, is careful to distinguishbetween adult education and workers’ education (Hopkins 1985: 2). In vocationaleducation it is the needs of the job which determine the goals, content and methods, notthe adulthood of the learner.

Even outside these areas of study, in those activities which are, by their nature,con® ned to, or are generally accepted as primarily appropriate to, adults, because theydemand some degree of maturity in the learner, ± political education, parent education,women’ s studies, race studies, courses for the unemployed, for the aged ± the diversityof education for adults has become so great, that it has so far been impossible to presentit conceptually as a coherent whole. It shows ` ¼ considerable diŒerences of theory,organization, content and method, ¼ its parameters not consistently de® ned, itsterritory inadequately explored ’ (Titmus et al. 1979: 9). Attempts over a number ofyears to establish a science of adult education, to justify its status as a discipline, havefailed in the face of its ` atomization ’ and its failure to grow out of ` fragmentation at all ’(Mader 1992 : 3). This matters in universities of the Humboldtian tradition, in whichthose of mainland Europe mostly are. In the Anglo-American tradition it is enough thatadult education should form a clearly de® ned ® eld of study.

In his review of adult education research Kjell Rubenson has been obliged, by lackof available material from other parts of the world, to restrict himself to American andEuropean work (Rubenson 1996: 1964± 1968). He ® nds it is subject to criticism fromtwo directions. In the higher education institutions, in which research is concentrated,

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it is threatened for lack of scholarly sophistication (Bright 1989). In recent yearsdepartments of adult education have been closed or amalgamated with otherprogrammes. The existing emphasis on the training of educators of adults has increased,at the expense of their research role. On the other hand practitioners in the educationof adults are somewhat doubtful of the usefulness of research, pointing out theirsuccess over many years without it.

It is true that scholars of adult education, while insisting on its distinctiveness, havebuilt its distinctive body of knowledge largely on the basis of borrowings from other® elds ± philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology and others. It is true also that theseborrowings have been mostly determined by, and adapted to, the demands of practise.One is, however, entitled to ask how much that matters, except to those ¯ ailing theirway towards a discipline of adult education, if, by borrowing and adaptation, oneadvances knowledge, either of adult education or of the discipline from which theborrowing had been made.

Although some signi® cant contributions to knowledge, independent of otherdisciplines, have been made, there has been little borrowing from adult education, afurther indication that it has not achieved the status it continues to seek. Mostsigni® cantly, education as generally preceived by both its practitioners and the generalpublic ± that is, schooling, perhaps more appropriately labelled initial education ± haslargely continued to ignore it. Why should it not? Some people may share a diŒerentview:

Grossly misleading, too, is the division of education by the age of the educated;child education and adult education, ¼ Most misleading of all is the idea thateducation comes in the earlier years and ceases at some indeterminate pointbetween 18 and 30 (Perry 1966: 21).

But even at the end of the 20th century many, if not most, of those working in the ® eldstill share the opinion expressed by a professor of the University of London Institute ofEducation, ` education is simply upbringing ¼ bringing up children or young people ’(White 1982 : 5). Its aim is to create a mature man.

There is little evidence that either the theories or the practices of initial educationhave been in¯ uenced by the thinking or the activities of adult education. There aresome, potentially important, exceptions, notably distance education, the in¯ uence ofprior experience on learning, experiential education and self-directed learning, but theyare few. It is not so much that the ideas of adult education have been thought about andrejected as unsound or irrelevant, although that has happened, but that they have beenignored. If there is any doubt about this, one has only to consult The InternationalEncyclopedia of Education (Husen and Postlethwaite 1994).

This work (12 volumes in its second edition) is well on the way to acceptance as theauthoritative compendium of current educational fact and thinking worldwide. It canhardly be called limited in its choice of contributors. They were drawn from 96 countries(Elsevier 1998: 160). Nor does it ignore adult education, although the 142 articlesdevoted to it out of 1200 constitute only a small proportion of the whole. The emphasison initial education is obvious, but not unjusti ® ed in an encyclopedia which claims withsome success to give an accurate overview of the current situation worldwide ofeducation as a ® eld of research, study and discourse. It represents the view, not perhapsof the editors and contributors , who are bound, in an encyclopedia, to try and presenteducation as it is, rather than as they would wish it to be. Incidental to its main purposes

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concepts and practices of adult education 349

it gives an account of the present practice of education that is, on the whole, quiteconvincing.

For the purposes of this article the most signi® cant are not those contributionswhichare speci® c to particular aspects of initial education. One would not expect adulteducation to ® gure in those. One needs to examine those contributions, which purportto treat subjects which are general to the whole of education ± its philosophy, values,objectives, psychology, sociology, for example. In a single article only some can beconsidered. A few are so general that their particular relevance to any aspect ofeducation may be di� cult to see. Philosophy of Education: Historical Overview (Phillips1994 International Encyclopedia of Education [IEE], vol. 8, 4447± 4456) is one such.Philosophy of Education: Western European Perspectives is more revealing, however. In the® rst paragraph the author writes

After the Second World War, Anglo-Saxon philosophyof educationwas primarily± though not exclusively ± a philosophy of schooling. Continental philosophy ofeducation, however, concerned itself mainly with problems within the broad ® eldof child-rearing. (Smeyers 1994 IEE: vol. 8, 4456)

He goes on himself to treat education merely as the process of preparing children foradult life.

In Values in Educational Enquiry: Philosophical Issues (Zecha 1994 IEE, 8, 6579) theauthor’ s concern is limited to the development of values by ` educators ’ and families inthe ` growing generation ’ . In Education and the State (Meek 1994 IEE: 3, 1713± 1720),discussion is restricted to schools and the special case of higher education. The authorof The Sociology of Education: Overview (Saha 1994 IEE: 10, 5596± 5607) writes that ` thedevelopment of the ® eld (sociology of education) will continue to re¯ ect thepreoccupation of countries in the performance of schools and the educational needs ofsociety ’ . By the latter he means those to be met by initial education. Moral Education:Philosophical Issues (F. Oser and R. Reichenbach 1994 I.E.E. 7, 3920± 3924) treats thetopic only from the point of view of the upbringing of children.

Particularly signi® cant because of its importance to the practise of educationthroughout life is the ® eld of developmental psychology. For teachers in initialeducation the ideas of Jean Piaget on cognitive development have been received wisdomfor many years, and still are (Demetriou 1994 IEE, 5: 2666± 2670). Most initialeducators, following Piaget, see it as developing by stages throughout childhood, untila person reaches maturity, when it is complete. Piaget either did not consider adulthoodat all, or took the traditional view, that it was a single stage, a plateau of maturity, onwhich no signi® cant cognitive change took place in normal individuals. Since 1950adult education work on cognition has largely abandoned the plateau theory as toosimple. Research indicates that most cognitive skills do not peak in adolescence, butcontinue to develop into early or middle adulthood (Schaie 1994 IEE: 1, 234± 239). Ifthat is so, or the idea of cognitive maturity in the Piagetian sense is open to question,then one might have supposed that initial educators would have found it of some use toexamine Piaget’ s perspective more critically. There has indeed been signi® cant criticismof his work, but little, if any, in the light of what is now known about adult development.

It may be argued that the omission of adult education from some of the articles ongeneral topics in The International Encyclopedia of Education is justi® ed because separatearticles are devoted to these topics in relation to adult education (Jarvis 1994 IEE: 10,5591± 5596, Titmus 1994 IEE, 1: 111± 120), but this is true of only a few of these subjects

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and, in any case, the fact that they are treated in separate articles provides furtherevidence that adult education is considered to be something diŒerent from education.Indeed, a comparison of some topics as they are treated under the latter rubric withtheir treatment under the former supports the view that there are signi® cant diŒerencesbetween them as they are usually conceived. Political Education (Ichilov 1994 IEE: 8,4568± 4571) is seen as the socialization of young people to become responsible citizenswithin the society in which they live. Critical Approaches to Adult Education (Westwood1994 IEE: 2, 1189± 1194), on the other hand, examines what in theory and in practice,has been a major thread running through adult education,political education to changesociety, by revolutionary action if necessary.

One has only to study the focus of Unesco’ s International Bureau of Education, asevidenced by its periodical, Educational Innovation and Information, to realize that thepicture presented by the International Encyclopedia of Education is not atypical, even amongscholars.

The division between education, which I shall henceforth in this article call initialeducation, and adult education constitutes a very neglected obstacle in the way ofachieving lifelong learning and of lifelong education, viewed as one instrument forachieving it. In an ideal world lifelong learning, in its pure, or extreme, form, might beseen as an essential constituent of life, throughout life, not merely a valuable tool forliving, but one of its purposes. Working as we are, on the basis of what we have now andunder intense time pressure, it is di� cult to see how it is to be achieved.

From what has been argued here, placing initial education and adult education endto end, tidying up where they overlap and calling the result lifelong education wouldchange nothing but the label. Making adult education ` both universal and lifelong’ , assuggested in the 1919 Report to the British Government (Waller 1956: 55), even thoughit would leave initial education unchanged, with the existing disjunction between thetwo, has had its advocates. According to Gu$ nter Dohmen,

Current trends and international discussions indicate that it would be best to startwith the continuing education ® eld when putting the educational reform conceptof ` lifelong learning ’ into practice. (Dohmen 1996: 100)

But he goes on to write ` the foundation for active lifelong learning should be laid duringchildhood and adolescence ’ (Dohmen 1996: 100).

Extending initial education throughout life, with its fundamental element ofcompulsion, its predominant goal of socialization, its authoritarian teacher-taughtrelationship, its curriculum restricted to what sponsors (mainly the state) rather thanlearners wish, is not inconceivable. Essentially communist states worked that way foryears and the disrepute into which courses in Marxism-Leninism fell should not beallowed to obscure other, considerable successes. However, the prospect of achievinglifelong learning by such an extension would be remote, even if it were attempted. Notonly does adult education stand at present as an uncompromising obstacle in its way butlifelong education and even its related concepts, such as recurrent education andcontinuing education, have so far left ` the formal education of children and youngpeople relatively untouched ’ (Sutton 1994, I.E.E.: 6, 3420).

Compulsion or coercion, socialization, authoritarian teaching, subjection to thepower of those who ® nance it may have become increasingly prominent in education foradults, but most adult educators would argue cogently against their playing the role ofJonah to the whale of initial education. They could certainly argue that the whale, in

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its present state of evolution, would ® nd parts of Jonah indigestible. They have longproposed andragogic } pedagogic, social, ethical and political reasons for keeping theirdistance, some of which diŒer from those of the monster. Of course they are also movedby considerationsof theirown identityand status.There would be no divine interventionto cause this monster to regurgitate them, nor could they expect, in their stage ofevolution, to be absorbed so as to become a major part of the tail that wags the beast.The truth is that neither Jonah or the whale in their current states of practise could swimcomfortably together in a sea of lifelong education or learning. Furthermore, it wouldbe a dead sea, if they attempted it.

I shall abandon this biblical metaphor before if swallows me, to emphasize that bothinitial education and adult education need to undergo important modi® cations, iflifelong education} learning is to be achieved. There are a number of reasons forbelieving, as Dohmen does, that it would be best to begin with what in the Englishversion of his book, Lifelong Learning, he has called continuing education (as a closertranslation than adult education of the German, Weiterbildung) (Dohmen 1996: 100). Ithas so far proved impossible to establish it as a discipline, or to de® ne its parameters asa ® eld of study in terms that contribute substantially to the practice of education foradults. Not much would be lost except perhaps status and a sense of identity for itsprofessionals, therefore, if such eŒorts were abandoned, in favour of the study of it as aconstituent part of lifelong education} learning, rather than, as now, considering it as aself-standing entity. Its lack of de® nition is the reverse side of its traditional claim to¯ exibility in content, teaching method and adminstration, designed to meet the wishesof learners, providers and sponsors. It has remained highly geared to their immediategrati® cation and its limited subjection to the rigidities of institutionalization has madeit capable of speedy response to perceived need over an almost limitless ® eld. In factalmost all that is done and how it is done in its name could be absorbed painlessly intolifelong education} learning, of which they are held, in any account I have read, to beimportant and de® ning desiderata.

It is true that ¯ exibility, attachment to immediate grati ® cation, freedom frominstitutionalization and speed of response are not as great as they were. There is littledoubt that the Club of Rome’ s contention that our learning does not keep pace with thecurrent problems of human society is even more justi® ed today, both in initial educationand adult education. It seems particularly true of the former in an era of acceleratingknowledge change. In the advanced world at least, the weight of bureaucracy of thenetwork of schools and institutes of tertiary education, designed as most of them are, foronce in a lifetime education, make it di� cult to alter. So too do the in¯ uence upon thegeneral public of a schooling tradition, through which all of us have passed, of therigidity, of the appeal to supposedly eternal verities, when most of the world is seen tohave current needs, which more urgently require to be met, or future ones, which mustbe foreseen now and acted upon before it is too late. To some extent the less structured,shallower rooted education provision of the Third World will ® nd it easier to adapt tolifelong education than that of the advanced world.

This article has dwelt on the problem of adapting initial education and adulteducation to constitute a scheme of lifelong education. Essential though it will be toresolve this di� culty, it will still leave us short of the further goal of lifelong learning.The shifting of emphasis to that aim has developed mainly out of the education of adultsrather than initial education. Without suggesting that structured programmes ofeducation provided for adults by others have no place in lifelong learning, scholars suchas Alan Tough have pointed out that many, if not most, adults conduct their own

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learning projects outside such a framework and should be encouraged, in order toincrease their eŒectiveness (Tough 1979). Malcolm Knowles would make the desire andability to take responsibility for one’ s own learning a criterion of human maturity(Knowles 1988). Both have retreated, in response to criticism, from their originalpositions as too simplistic and too extreme. Nevertheless, there are strong reasons forbelieving that a large measure of self-directed learning, both within and without formalprogrammes, will be essential to any realistic scheme of lifelong learning (Dohmen1996: 50± 61). Among other advantages, learners will have more freedom to choosewhat, when and how to learn, considerable ® nancial savings and organizationalsimpli® cation should be possible. It will also be necessary to maximize the learning,conscious or unconscious, that is incidental to all life experience.

A surprising feature of the movement for self-directed learning is the degree of helpthat people are seen to require in order to direct their own learning e� ciently. A newindustry of facilitation and counselling is being created within the education of adults.For most of human existence native wit was su� cient for people to ful® l their functionas learning animals. Today, in order to cope eŒectively with the complex personal,social and economic world in which we live, it seems that innate ability is not enough.It appears that people need to acquire skills both in purposive learning and in theunconscious learning that is incidental to and a product of all life experience. We needto have our minds trained to such an extent and in such a way that, even unconsciously,we learn to best eŒect. Like a competent cyclist, unconsciously and automaticallyadjusting to retain balance, we need to be constantly adjusting to learn from oureveryday experience.

If that is the case, then children ought to be included in ` people ’ , and the matureperson, whom so much schooling aims to produce, will be incomplete without highlydeveloped learning skills. In fact initial education has hardly been touched by the ideathat one could and should develop learning skills systematically. It still holds to thebelief that skills of learning can only be acquired through the actual process of learninga subject ± in 19th century Europe Latin and Greek were considered to serve thispurpose supremely well. This might have been excused when education was modelledon what was provided for the upper classes and little systematic study of the learningprocess had been undertaken, but that is not the case now.

In spite of some slow progress of organization, method and content to make initialeducation an adequate preparation for continuing education or learning, (either termwould be more appropriate than adult education in countries with universal initialeducation, were it not for the fact that continuingeducation has been hijacked to signifymainly professional education), it is still mostly conceived and practised as a front-endoperation, moulded by compulsory attendance,at the end of which the educated personhas been produced. This person is able to cope, with minor assistance, with all thechanging circumstances of the rest of life (White 1982). Since this belief has not changedmuch since the 19th century, it justi® es the charge that our education is not keepingpace with our current problems (Club of Rome 1979) and certainly not with theproposed practice of lifelong learning.

It is tempting and the easier option to begin working towards lifelong learning byadapting continuingeducation (aka adult education), as Dohmen recommends, but thenature of the latter is inevitably and fundamentally aŒected by what it is continuing,that is initial education. From an educational point of view post-initial education orearning must work with the people that initial education, if any, passes on to it. Hencethe large proportion of young people who view the end of compulsory attendance with

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relief and value their freedom from educational obligation more highly than thecontinuation of their intentional learning. Hence the poverty of their learning skills orhabits, the inadequacy of their knowledge base, whether because of an ill-chosen or anover-crowded curriculum, or inappropriate or incompetent teaching. The pedagogicfailure may be one of the individual teacher, but it may well be a consequence ofinstitutional short termism, which requires teachers to concentrate, at most, on theimmediate post-compulsory to the neglect of the lifelong perspective.

There is little sign of eŒective action on the part of those, policy makers, providersor scholars, in adult education, to get together with those in initial education to resolvethe transition to, and participation eŒectively in, post-initial education. Initialeducators, confronted with this atomized, ever-changing ® eld, may well ask what, apartfrom the now dominant element of vocationally orientated education, they should bepreparing their students for.

It is possible to point to some indicationsthat the prospects of achieving at least someform of lifelong learning are increasing, but the weight of the past and the present, fromwhich it cannot entirely free itself, seem to ensure that it will be imperfect andincomplete. Among other handicaps, a strong case could be made for arguing that toomuch emphasis is being laid on history, the traditions of culture and politics (at themoment, particularly, the concept and practice of the nation state). The scope ofeducation at any level cannot be made unlimited. To understand the past out of whichwe come may enrich us, but how much time and eŒort can we aŒord to devote to it, ifthe principal aim of education should be to enable learners to foresee and mould thefuture, as may very well be the case? Moreover, the problems of what form lifelongeducation or lifelong learning should take and how fast they need to establishthemselves, particularly the latter, are far from being resolved, or even understood.They are, however, crucial issues, if education at any level, is to exercise a signi® cantin¯ uence on the often contradictory drives for development of such phenomena as thenation state, democracy, the globalization of human society. With the prospect of aneven faster changing human society before us, it is impossible to foresee its lifelongeducational needs with any certainty. Perhaps the best that we can hope for are theacquisition of learning skills for the immediate future, the ability to adapt such skills tomeet the requirements of changing circumstances and, above all, the ability and will toapply learning to action.

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