The Contribution of University Extension to Learning

Abstract

O NE of the paradoxical and yet intriguing characteristics of the adult-education movement in the United States is the elusiveness with which it defies definition, logical analysis, and classification. It is always bursting forth in new guise, traveling in new directions, making new friends. No conveniently handy pigeonhole has yet been constructed in the field of American education which will encompass and hold within bounds all of its devious and multifarious forms. As a consequence professional workers in the field of adult education, even when they recognize and identify themselves as such, frequently find it necessary to redefine purposes, revise assumptions no longer valid, re-examine relationships with other groups in the adult-education ranks. It is the National University Extension Association which in its annual conventions of I947 and I948 has taken up the challenge of adult education to university extension and re-examined the r6le of the university in adult education through general extension. Many of the questions to which the Association members are now seeking tentative answers will be of interest and concern to the readers of the JOURNAL. Administrative officers of extension divisions will welcome ideas from their academic colleagues as through their professional association they rethink and reappraise the principles and policies under which our institutions of higher learning extend their campuses and their resources in wider service to community, state, and nation. This article raises only two of the questions which seem likely to enter into such a reappraisal of the role of university extension in adult education. Although experience in the University of California Extension, and the author's own judgments, will color the points discussed, the major purpose of this article is to stimulate further discussion on issues concerning which no final answers have as yet been found. If we take Lyman Bryson's oftquoted definition of adult education as including all the activities with an educational purpose that are carried on by people engaged in the ordinary business of life, it is evident that most of the activities in which university-extension divisions engage technically qualify as part of adult education. True enough, there are the resident centers which operate in many states for off-campus instruction of full-time students. In addition, there are special schools and divisions