National and international associations 50 years on

Author/s: Alan Tuckett

Edition: Volume 50, Number 3, November 2010

Summary: Looking back fifty years is a salutary experience. There is a sense that everything changes, and everything stays the same. Whilst we now have a global non-government organisation to support national bodies in the field of adult learning, most of the national members have a fragile financial base, and the International Council for Adult Education struggles to find secure funders for its global advocacy work. If the profession of adult education has grown dramatically since the 1960s, it feels in too many countries as though it is now well past its zenith, with the optimism of mass literacy campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s giving way to the narrow focus of the Millennium Development Goals—where you look in vain for the explicit recognition of the role of adult education.

Keywords: International Council for Adult Education, global advocacy, developmental goals

Facebooktwitterlinkedinmail  Share a copy of this abstract.

This article is part of AJAL, Volume 50_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.