So, teaching adults calls for a sensitivity towards the person
who, because he is an adult, has become accustomed to
making his own decisions, accustomed to exercising a certain
measure of control over his own life.

Experience
The second major difference between adults and children is in the
degree of experience they have accumulated. Adults are more
experienced simply because they have lived longer! Whereas when
we ask a child who he is, he will usually describe his identity in
terms of his parents, his school or where he lives, an adult will
define himself in terms of his experience. An adult's self-identity is
derived from what he has done. Therefore, we adults become very
protective of our experience; and whenever we find people ignoring
or devaluing it, we feel a kind of rejection and frustration.
The consequence for us as teachers of adults is that we
should take every opportunity to draw on and utilize the
experience of those we are teaching.

Orientation to Learning
In many aspects of life, a youth thinks mainly of the present. He
looks for immediate satisfactions; he finds it hard to wait a long
time for the rewards for his efforts. An adult becomes much more
accustomed to postponing his satisfactions and rewards. However,
with regard to learning, the time perspective of young people and
adults is reversed. Children are conditioned to learning things that
do not have an immediate application. A good deal of what they
learn at school is accumulated in a reservoir of knowledge and skills
that will--or may-be useful in later life. An adult's orientation to
learning, however, is likely to be different. He will want to be able
to apply his learning to his immediate concerns. Like the image of
the adult in the illustration, he will want to turn the key-he will
want to apply his learning to his current concerns and tasks.
Therefore, it is important in our extension work that we
focus on the interests and problems that the farmers bring
with them to our discussions and field days.
The farmers who attend our demonstrations, who listen to
us on our rounds of visiting, are adults as well as our
"students". Because of their previous experience of school-
ing-maybe because of their attitudes towards any kind of
authority figure-some of them may not expect to have
their own experience taken into account in the processes of