ABSTRACT
The hypothesis it is now possible to formulate, therefore, is that in the case of adult and lifelong education there is a crucial distinction to make between agencies of curriculum development and agents of educational provision. An important theoretical issue which does arise from the questions concerns the extent to which apparently autonomous agents of provision as the organisers of adult education could actually engage in curriculum development at all. This chapter considers the issue of curriculum development as a category of educational innovation in rather broader theoretical terms. The lockstep, traditional mode of formal education makes continuous learning unduly difficult, because in the past it has almost always been implicit that learning is both the province of formal educational institutions and of youth. Adult education institutions, that is, exist in functional relations with other social institutions and adapt to 'fit' into a wider social system which apparently, changes under its own momentum.
