ABSTRACT

WE turn from a consideration of the forces which have led to the creation of movements for adult education and have determined their direction in some smaller countries with limited resources in relation to population to the impact on educational movements of the vastly different situation in the United States of America. The very limitations of space and wealth have given to countries such as Britain and Denmark a certain unity of national sentiment and stability of cultural life which are lacking in the greater fluidity of conditions and culture in the U.S.A. One has only to travel the 2,800 miles across the continent, or the 1,600 miles from north to south, to realize the impossibility of any kind of generalization about American social conditions and institutions. It is a land of contrasts: small-scale farming and extensive cultivation in the vast prairie lands of the Middle West; great commercial cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, or teeming centres of industry such as Pittsburg or Detroit, and remote and still primitive settlements south of the Mason-Dixon line and between the rich black-earth regions of the east and the well-watered agricultural lands of the Pacific coast. Outside the cities generally, but differing among themselves in the different states, there are millions of people living simple, hard-working lives, whose horizons are bounded by the prospects of the next harvest, by the problems of home-making under comparatively primitive conditions, and by the state of the weather. The great population of 151,000,000, swelled by successive waves of immigration, contains large elements not yet fully assimilated; and the growing negro population of over 15,000,000 represents an average level of culture far below that of the whites.