The Library and Continuing Education

ing education is as lacking in exact delineation today as it was twenty years ago. We continue to seek positive definition of our own role and of the library's relationship to other institutions and agencies carrying out adult education programs within their communities. Within the framework of continuing education we include liberal adult educa-tion, parent education and family life education, education for per-sonal development and cultural enrichment, intercultural education, and those important elements of remedial education which include basic literacy training, reading improvement and training in job-related skills. A Platform for Continuing Education for Adults and the State of New York,l issued in 1960, suggests four types of con-tinuing education-education for work life, for family life, for public life, and for richer living-and these categories accurately point out the broad scope of continuing education. A definition proposed by Grace Stevenson in 1954 is relevant today; she said then, "Is not adult education really, in simplest terms, the continuing education of adults necessary to all men if they are to fulfill their obligations and realize their highest potential as members of society no matter at what level it begins, what details it involves, or how it is obtainedT2 With this broad definition in mind, there can be no valid arguments between formal class work and informal self-education, between individual reading and group participation, between remedial reading and read-ing and discussion of Plato or Camus. Rather, the total resources of a community, including all the materials and services of the public library, must focus on the needs of the citizenry at a given time, must establish immediate and long-range objectives to meet these needs, and must anticipate the changing needs of the future. How does the public library meet this responsibility