The Meaning of Adult Education or Continuing Education

The Meaning of Adult Education by Eduard Lindeman is a timeless book on adult education or continuing education. It is a collection of essays regarding Lindeman's views on adult education, in which he investigates how adults learn, what motivates them to learn and how this learning can increase the quality of their lives and ultimately the society in which they live.

Written in 1926 it is amazing that so much of the content is still very relevant to adult education today, and on each page something can be found that is worthy of being quoted or saved to read another day. For example:

• "The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings. This new venture is called adult education."
• "In conventional education the student is required to adjust himself to an established curriculum; in adult education the curriculum is built around the student's needs and interests."
• "The resource of highest value in adult education is the learner's experience. If education is life, then life is also education."
• "In teaching children it may be necessary to anticipate objective experience by uses of imagination but adult experience is already there waiting to be appropriated. Experience is the adult learner's living textbook."
• "The real distinction between educated and uneducated persons is not to be found in such superficial criteria as academic degrees, formal study or accumulation of facts; indeed, formal learning may, and often does, lead people into narrow scholarship and out of life."
• "Growth should be a process of integrating emotions with thought, an evolving capacity for feeling more deeply and thinking more clearly. Educative experience spans the whole of life."

This book is a "must read" for anyone associated with adult education!

Contents Covered:

• Foreword
• For Those Who Need to Be Learners
• To Those Who Have Faith in Intelligence
• With Respect to the Use of Power
• In View of the Need for Self-Expression
• For Those Who Require Freedom
• For Those Who Would Create
• To Those Who Appreciate
• To an Age of Specialism
• As Dynamic for Collective Enterprise
• In Terms of Method
• Postscript
• References
• Index