ABSTRACT
It is a great privilege to contribute to this anniversary issue of Comparative Education and to record how the study of the comparative education of adults has emerged: this changing scene was the reason why Edmund King approached me to join the Editorial Board since the journal was beginning to receive submissions which were of an adult education nature. My career has not quite spanned the length of time this journal has been published, since I have only been in higher education for 45 years, but over the past 50 years the education of adults has seen many changes, and most of these have happened during my career in higher education – and so this paper includes a number of personal references and quotes from my own writing. However, this paper is not so much an historical analysis as a comparative reflection of some of these changes which were driven by the forces of globalisation resulting in the global capitalist market. This paper contains seven parts, starting with the situation of adult education from just before I entered it in 1976.
