Education is a practical art. Education is a cooperative rather than operative art. The planning or analysis of an educational activity is usually undertaken in terms of some period that the mind abstracts for analytical purposes from complicated reality. A program design should be based on decision points, not prescriptions. This book, written near the close of Houle s career, rejects the notion that there should be a distinction between education for children and that of adults.
Education is fundamentally the same wherever and whenever it occurs.
If pedagogy and andragogy are distinguishable, it is not because they are essentially different from one another but because they represent the working out of the same fundamental processes at different stages of life. However, he seems to suggest, in presenting his eleven categories of educational programs, that adult education may be distinguished in its source of authority and control in the design and planning.