International Adult Education: A Personal Reflection From Australia

Abstract

I was born during the Second World War, in Sydney, Australia, and was educated in public schools and at a state teachers' college, largely during the 1950s. I began my working life as an elementary school teacher in the early 1960s, and entered higher education as a lecturer at a small teachers' college in the early 1970s. I retired from paid employment at the University of Technology, Sydney, as an associate professor in adult education at the end of 2005. Now as I look back over my life, I realize that the one enduring theme that runs like a thread through my professional life is a strong interest in international adult education. I suppose that I first became interested in the wider world when, as a student in elementary school, I explored ways of living around the world. In high school, geography was a favorite subject, and ms a student teacher at the teachers' college, I found the study of comparative education to be fascinating. While part of my interest in international matters is personal, another part has to do with nationality. Australia is a federation of 6 states and 2 territories, and it occupies a continent of about the same land area as the contiguous 48 states of the United States. Its population is relatively small (about 20 million persons). Its European history is relatively short (not much more than 200 years) though, of course, the culture of the Australian Aborigines is one of oldest in the World. Australia and the Wider World of Adult Education The most significant fact about Australia is its isolation, as any American who has visited our shores will quickly tell you. One of the best-known histories of Australia is called The Tyranny of Distance. The distance and, more significantly, the concomitant feeling of isolation have meant that, over the years, Australians have become great travelers, both for personal and professional reasons. In earlier times, such travel was quite difficult, involving lengthy sea journeys, which were often measured in months. Moreover, given Australia's status as one of the nations of the British Commonwealth, the final destination of such travel was almost inevitably Great Britain. But the vast changes--social, economic, political, and technological--that followed the Second World War, meant that in the second haft of the twentieth century, Australians looked more and more to the United States and the developing nations of Asia. That was the case with adult education. From the 1950s onward, Australian adult educators came in regular contact with adult educators from North America. Among the first group of North American adult educators who visited Australia in the 1950s and 1960s were Evelyn Bates, Richard Franklin, Paul H. Sheats, Alexander N. Charters, and Alexander A. Liveright. Australian adult educators were also traveling to the United States. Joan Allsop, who traveled to New York City to pursue graduate study at the Teachers' College, Columbia University in the 1950s, is generally regarded as the first Australian to gain a doctorate in adult education. Professor Paul H. Sheats, Dean of Extension, University of California, undertook a study tour of Australia in 1959. The results of his study were published the next year, and included two of his more significant recommendations: the need for a unified national adult education association and for Australian adult educators to become more involved in the then-emerging field of international adult education. These recommendations coincided with strong pre-existing trends within the field of Australian adult education. That same year (1960), the AAAE (Australian Association of Adult Education) was founded and an Australian delegation participated in UNESCO's Second World Conference on Adult Education in Montreal. The growing interest, indeed, an eagerness among Australian adult educators to be more involved internationally, culminated in the Regional Seminar on Adult Education organized by UNESCO, which was held ha Sydney in January 1964. …