ABSTRACT
Political education as adult education The assumption that educational experiences should be offered at a time when they have meaning (otherwise, by definition, they cannot be educative) has led to advocacy that political education should be left until the stage of adult education. Livingstone remarked upon the paradox that 'youth studies but cannot act: the adult must act, and has no opportunity for study' (p. 142). And, writing in a political context, Laski criticized the existing social system on the grounds that 'its cure for ignorance has been an educational system which ended for the great mass of people, at the very point where knowledge begins to exercise its fascination' (1942, p. 202).
