To Make Continuing Education a Reality

As she also implies, there is no unanimity about the meaning of the term, about what it implies for individuals and society, and what strategies and policies need to be adopted if it is to become a reality in our lifetimes. Neither educators nor decision makers are in the forefront of a battle to obtain more education for themselves as adults. Adults as parents are concerned about the quality of education their children receive. It does not occur to many to question the lack of provision for themselves. It is only recently that the Trades Union Congress has included 'continuing education' as a priority in their demands (TUC, I978). It is also difficult to argue in a time of economic stagnation for education to be given a bigger slice of the national cake, and even more difficult to argue that other parts of the education sector should give up some of their existing resources. Newsam (1979) pointed out recently the fallacy that falling rolls would release more and more resources from a fixed total to be redeployed to adult This he said was just not the way the Treasury operated. The financial procedure was to scale down resources to numbers of pupils and then put a bit back for diseconomies of decline. One trouble was that teacher unions were currently demanding disproportionately more of those extras which might otherwise have gone to continuing education.