Since learning is social. learners are not always free to learn what they would like; often the learners' learning is prescribed. Education, for instance, is the provision of learning opportunities, but these opportunities are often bound by parameters decided by what the providers wish the learners to learn. Hence, there is a fundamental need to help learners to develop a sense of criticality. State-provided education. for instance, has been traditionally something restricted to children, who are expected to learn what is prescribed, although religious institutions educated older people many centuries before children were educated. By contrast, state education occurred only during the formative years and when social maturity or adulthood was achieved, then education ceased. This approach may be found in many early writers on the subject.John Stuart Mill, for instance, claimed that the content of education was to be found in"the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be their successors' (quoted in Lester Smith, 1966:9). Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist and educationalist, regarded education in a similar manner: for him it was the influence exercised by adult generations o those who are not yet ready for social life' (1956:71). But by the begin ning of the twentieth century it was becoming more apparent in the We that an intergenerational perspective was not adequate to describe the educational process John De 1916:8), for instance, was forced to add the prefix formal to the term education in order to express the same