ABSTRACT
Adult and continuing education is a vast and varied enterprise. Broadly defined it is part of the experience of virtually every mature individual around the world.' As the terms are generally used - with closely allied terms like 'recurrent education' favoured in Europe or 'lifelong learning' favoured in North America - adult and continuing education refers to:
the many and diverse educational activities in which individuals or groups engage, some activities deliberately organised for learning and some not;
2 the design and administration of educational programmes, and the instructional component of them, in post-secondary educational institutions and in organisations of many kinds (corporations, museums, churches, etc.);
3 an academic or scholarly speciality or field, primarily in colleges of education and the applied social or behavioural sciences, though many professors of adult education would prefer 'discipline', reflecting increasing sophistication in research in recent decades (Jarvis, 1991).
