Worker's Education in Australia and Canada: A Comparative Approach to Labour's Cultural History‪.‬

HOW EFFECTIVE were Canadian working people, when compared with their Australian counterparts, in producing alternatives to the broader norms that can be described as the dominant cultures in the two countries? Such a general question requires some limits. This paper takes adult education and workers' education as representative examples of the cultural expression of working people in Canada and Australia. By examining the history of these specialized educational enterprises, it compares the paths taken by Canadian and Australian workers as they sought to achieve their intellectual, social, and material aspirations. This approach to adult education and labour culture focuses on the relations between two types of formal educational enterprise, those that profess a community-wide mandate and those created within the labour movement exclusively for the development of its members. These relations were fundamentally influenced by informal collective activities within working people's communities. The nature of these informal relations distinguishes Australia's labour culture from that of Canada.