THE FEATURES OF ADULT EDUCATION IN CANADA AND GREAT BRITAIN: HISTORICAL ASPECT

Abstract

The article determines the features of adult education in Canada and Great Britain including the historical aspect of development. In general the adult education is the important part of continuous education. Among European countries Great Britain and Denmark are the leaders in distribution of professional studies and adult educations. There have been created new programs and projects of international educational processes supporting in these countries. In such projects considerable attention is paid to planning and training of adult individuals. At the same time, the adult education in Great Britain is one of priorities of public policy and bases on old historical traditions, high-quality indexes, sound scientificallypedagogical researches, and practice of realization led to the effectiveness. The analysis of scientific literature showed that there have been used plenty of terms of continuous education conception in Great Britain, among them continuing education, andragogy, andragogics, andragology, recurrent education, adult education, permanent education, adult pedagogy, lifelong learning, оpen learning, and further education. The Open University became one of main universities of Great Britain that developed the idea of adult education. The author also admitted, that at the end of 70th the mechanism of government control of adult education system in Great Britain changed enough. These changes touched the part of scientific and technical progress of general economic crisis on a background passing of the country to the system of free market relations. At the same time, in majority universities of Great Britain there were founded centers of adult education. Such centers proposed the academic courses of different forms of studies and offered the ideas of forming knowledge in a counterbalance classic and called as transferring of knowledge from a teacher to the student. Thus, there is the gradual passing to the mixed type of management of adult education named as decentralized centralism. There is the effectiveness legislative support from the side of the state in Canada and Great Britain. At the same time, in these countries the government created the legislative base of adult education with different various of aspects.