Education and Early Research
Allen Tough was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. During his years as a student at the University of Toronto, Allen Tough's interests included psychology, sociology, philosophy, global issues, alternative futures, journalism, youth education, and adult education as well as soccer, skating, dancing, campus publications, and wilderness hiking. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the 450-page all-campus yearbook for two years, recruiting and supervising a staff of 40 volunteers.
During his twenties, he taught high-school English and Guidance for two years, earned his M.A. at the University of Toronto, married and began his family, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. In Chicago, in line with his focus on the psychology of adult learning and change, he did a Ph.D. internship in conference planning and wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the behavior of adults during self-directed learning projects.
Until the end of the 1970s, Dr. Tough's line of research focused on the adult's successful efforts to learn and change, particularly the 70% of adults who are self-guided without relying much on professionals or institutions. His first books, The Adult's Learning Projects and Intentional Changes, were based on his thesis research.
Read more about this topic: Allen Tough
Famous quotes containing the words education and, education, early and/or research:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“‘Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.”
—William Congreve (1670–1729)
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)