ABSTRACT
To discuss trends and prospects in adult education within a worldwide context might seem presumptuous but there is a valid reason for it. Education in general and adult education as a distinctive sector thereof is one social institution that has evolved since the Second World War under the influence of public aspirations and pressures that are common to virtually all countries. At the most recent world conference on adult education, held at Tokyo in 1972, delegates from capitalist and socialist countries, from advanced industrialised and less developed countries, from the Northern and Southern hemispheres, experienced no great difficulty in understanding one another’s aims and problems and shared a common terminology. In the words of the book commissioned by Unesco to commemorate the Conference:
This mutual understanding might partly be attributed to the high percentage of adult education specialists who were present. The same explanation cannot be invoked to explain why at the Tokyo Conference the Director-General of Unesco could justly claim in his concluding address that the delegates belonged to ‘the same intellectual universe’, for the majority of them were politicians and administrators, generalists rather than specialists. The explanation lay instead in the rapidity with which information about educational practice in general has spread from country to country, so that to a considerable degree many ideas, experiences, problems and aspirations are shared in common. 1
In this paper it is proposed to consider the most important trends and to reflect on the prospects for adult education as mankind approaches the beginning of the third millennium.