Adult education and palliative care: the last journey of life and two main kinds of adult learning

Abstract

Hospice and palliative care for the terminally ill, together with support for families and friends of the dying, through to the natural stages of grief and bereavement, is a growing movement in many countries. In Australia the movement has brought together health care professionals, volunteer workers and the wider community (notably clergy, lawyers, politicians as well as ordinary people) in recognition of the social responsibility to make provision for this area of common need and inevitable individual experience. This paper explores the current and emerging connections between the hospice and palliative care movement, based on an action research project in South Australia, and two kinds of adult learning, conveniently described as adult continuing education and adult community education. Underpinning the description and analysis of these connections is an idealised argument, to the effect that the spirit of adult education, as a deep‐seated voluntary learning movement, continues to find expression through a search for needs and values of human relevance in a changing socio‐cultural context. The mildly optimistic message, therefore, is that in spite of the depressing effects of economic rationalism people from all walks of life combine to use adult education as a means of understanding the mysteries of human life, not least the last journey of dying and death.