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As university institutions have grown, the university and community relationship has again become obscure and troubling. Today, no one has to defend the thesis that adults can learn. We have turned our attention to how, when, and at what price. Over the last twenty years, postsecondary education has witnessed a shift from elite to mass education. Adult public education, mostly of a remedial nature, was largely a failure prior to the mid-fifties. But by that time in Canada and the U.S., the private sector (industry, armed services, etc.) had created teaching and learning systems that sometimes dwarfed the public sector in scope, results, and costs. During this same period, the mistaken view of education as an investment was accepted and transmitted to developing countries. What has been thrown into perspective now is the distinction between learning and education and how the two are related. Education, a social endeavor, is the way society responds to the capacity of its members to learn. The Canadian university must create its own community not identified by a single place, the student's age, or the instructional process. It must cease to evaluate conventional students for society. The university should focus on where, how, why, and what learning is taking place. (CSS)

This paper inquires analytically about the connotative meaning of the terms poverty and learning as they function in the language of comparative education research. In the analysis of concepts, the analytical techniques used are the techniques of definition, explication, illustration, and substitution. Four conceptions of the term learning and five conceptions of the term poverty are discussed. When these conceptions (or definitions) are substituted into statements it was found that malfunctions in language occur. Such a language malfunction is an ambiguity in meaning in which a single term simultaneously connotes two or more meanings. The problem, then, is a systematic ambiguity in the language of educational researchers. In order to dissolve the problem of ambiguity in their language, comparative education researchers, and researchers in general, must learn to distinguish among analytical, empirical, and valuative inquiry. That is, they must attend to the analyticity of their language and adhere to the rules of inquiry which are necessarily implied by the type of inquiry that is intended by the researchers. (PN)

The influence of situational expectations, conditioned by previous experience, on the interpretation of entire prose passages was investigated with 22 hearing and 18 hearing impaired adolescents. The ambiguous paragraph model was borrowed from D. Schallert and two separate paragraphs were constructed. Ten multiple choice questions were generated for each ambiguous paragraph. Each question had two possible correct answers, one for each of the two primary interpretations. Two distractor items were written, one for each of the two interpretations. The primary interpretation reponses and distractors were then randomly ordered for each test item. Ss were instructed to read the first paragraph, answer the questions and then proceed directly to the second paragraph. It was concluded from results that differential reading abilities of adults, as well as children, may not be due to linguistic differences but to the fact that a lifetime of different or incomplete experiences has not prepared them to organize the world in an optional fashion. (SBH)