The following few excerpts from The Meaning of Adult Education will give some insight into the thinking of one of MSU Extension's most remarkable agents. Education conceived as preparation for life locks the learning process within a vicious circle. Youth educated in terms of adult ideas and taught to think of learning as a process which ends when real life begins will make no better use of intelligence than the elders who prescribe the system. Education within the vicious circle becomes not a joyous enterprise but rather something to be endured because it leads to a satisfying end. But there can be no genuine joy in the end if means are irritating, painful.
Adult education is a process through which learners become aware of significant experience.
Recognition of significance leads to evaluation. Educated persons find their satisfactions in bringing knowledge to bear upon experience, and the best-informed person is still ignorant if his knowing is not also a lively ingredient of his living. Intelligence is the light which reveals educational opportunities in experience. Life is experiencing and intelligent living is a way of making experience an educational adventure. Adult education, happily, requires neither entrance nor exit examinations.