This essay explores the connections between such ideas as industrial democracy, deschooling, community and alternative schools, conscientisation, community development, and lifelong and continuing education. It challenges existing purposes, processes and content of schooling, and the assumptions underlying these about learning and socialization, and is written from a conviction that lifelong education, properly qualified and guarded from certain dangers, would be a better educational philosophy and system for Australia today and tomorrow than the present philosophy and system. An attempt is made to explicate the meaning and present status of the lifelong education concept in an effort to help sponsor its arrival and implementation. Discussion centers around the areas of (1) terms and meanings, (2) some overseas trends, (3) Australian education: tradition and change, and (4) analysis and prognosis. An extensive listing of sources and further readings is appended. (WL)