Rethinking Adult Learning

LAPIS MAGAZINE ONLINE
ARTICLE BY COENRAAD VAN HOUTEN

Education for adults should provide answers to the difficulties, challenges and questions posed by today’s economic, political, social, cultural and spiritual situation, a situation much changed since the beginning of the twentieth century and likely to continue changing at great speed if only because of the ongoing rapid development of technology, not least information technology.

All over the world in varying degrees technology and economics are more and more coming to dominate daily life. Adult education will therefore have to foster entirely new capabilities to cope with these changes in the world and in life situations. In former times a good basic education, with mostly a vocational or academic training added, was all we required in order to find our own way in life. Not so today. We now need to school quite specific new faculties in ourselves to be able to meet present life situations in a creative way.

A thorough investigation into how the individual human being is determined, conditioned, even blocked, by the pressures and demands of daily living, as well as post-graduate educational systems, will reveal which dormant human faculties are being neglected, conditioned or even suffocated with a specific purposefulness, faculties that will be sorely needed if we are to withstand the pressures as well as find creative answers to them. These faculties remain dormant if not consciously nurtured and developed by the independent adult ego through an adult education that can truly meet the challenges of our time. A good school education up to 21 years is a necessary preparation in that it unfolds the child’s abilities, but it is not enough for today’s challenges.

Here are a few examples: The countries of Europe were totally unprepared for what National Socialism could do to people. The way in which life under a Communist system could condition a people is still scarcely understood. Vaclav Havel and many others have given us vivid descriptions of the inner strengths required if one wanted to remain human under such systems. Both these political models can be expected to return---albeit under different names and with different faces. Will we be prepared when this happens?

Another model of global proportions is that of an economic, technical, commercial determinism which demands that economic prosperity must have priority over everything else. It is a philosophy emanating from the West that has gradually been taken over by the rest of the world, and all education, certainly adult education, will be expected to serve it at all costs, thus placing human needs under the dictatorship of economic necessity. Perhaps this appears exaggerated, yet the creeping trend of increasingly materialistic values can be detected everywhere. It is a trend---relatively unnoticed as yet---which causes economic and technological requirements to gain increasing control over the behavior of human beings by getting them to adjust to and fit in with a global economic system. This may seem logical, but it is not human when given priority over all other values in life. What better control than by means of a vocational training that is determined by economic principles and aims and has to abide by certain worldwide rules? If this succeeds, humanity will have a techno-economic and material future, but not a human future.

Many other conditioning trends can be detected as well. The above are merely a few indications. Healthy adult learning, which schools and strengthens genuine human capacities and the individual’s creativity and ability to develop, will enable people to stand up to the world in a constructive way. It teaches us to regard today’s life and culture as an area that challenges us to seek new developments, thus lending meaning to today’s worldwide problems: they become the arena where a new step in human evolution can be practiced. We thus learn to discern that it is humanity’s problems which show us what ought to be developed. The signs of the times are our teachers! Each of us must find and school the answers independently, while the adult educator’s task is to make this possible, provide the means and show the learning paths.

Adapted from the introduction to Practising Destiny: Principles and Processes in Adult Learning. Published by permission of Temple Lodge Press.
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Coenraad van Houten co-founded the Center for Social Development in Europe and the New Adult Learning Movement. He has developed numerous programs and seminars for educating adults.