Adult educationists in Scotland would like a new Scottish council for continuing education to help bring together the sector's diverse interests.

This is the majority view among a sample of Scottish panellists in a research project on the education of adults in Europe. A key question in the 16-country project, co-ordinated by Walter Leirman of Leuven University in Belgium, asked what national and European Union bodies should be doing to support adult education.

Around two-thirds of the Scottish panellists said there should be legislation governing the whole of adult education, with a single minister in charge, but they agreed that support should be a mixture of public and private funding.

But Sir Kenneth Alexander, former principal of Stirling University, speaking at a colloquy on the interim Scottish report, said that an all-embracing Scottish council would have to be designed to avoid discriminating against either vocational or non-vocational education.

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"It is difficult to understand how one can get a standard funding principle which serves both of these interests equally fairly," he said.

Scottish research coordinator Elisabeth Gerver, director of continuing education at Dundee University, said the idea of communitarianism underlay many of the responses from both adult education practitioners and students.

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"There was a sense of obligation to the community in terms of making opportunities more accessible, but also an implicit assumption that people owe it to society to enhance their own education."

Sir Kenneth, who 20 years ago chaired a Government committee on adult education, said he was very struck by the emphasis in responses on uncertainty and the lack of meaning of life. This had not emerged in the Alexander report, and he believed it stemmed from increasing secularisation and job insecurity.

Scottish responses mirrored Professor Leirman's European data in seeing unemployment, workforce reorganisation, and time and stress as the top three problems facing adults, but distrust of politics was higher in Scotland than the European average.

"This is terribly dangerous, because if you distrust politics, you distrust democracy," Sir Kenneth said.

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