Adult Education and Socialist Pedagogy

Frank Youngman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429780448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Originally published in 1986, this book was written at a time of increasing pressure on traditional areas of secondary and higher education and changing employment patterns - a situation which still exists today. Then, as now, there is increased awareness that the continuing education of adults has a vital role to play in our society. This volume develops a socialist pedagogy within adult education, using a Marxist theoretical framework. It proposes socialism as the radical form of change necessary to remove obstacles to greater social justice and educational equality and studies the implications of this political position for adult education.

CHAPTER ONE

ADULT EDUCATION FOR SOCIALISM

Adult education is no longer marginal. In the last two decades there has been a massive expansion of educational programmes for adults. This expansion has taken place throughout the world, in both the advanced industrialised countries and the underdeveloped countries. In the industrialised countries, economic restructuring, technological development and demographic changes are among the factors which have led to the greater involvement of adults in educational activities. Surveys in the USA in the 1970s suggested that one in three adults participated in some form of organised learning.¹ In the UK a 1980 survey showed that a total of 47% of the adult population had engaged in educational activity at some stage after their initial education.² In the underdeveloped countries, strategies for national development include a significant adult education component, for example in programmes to modernise agriculture, improve public health and raise levels of literacy. In Tanzania in 1975 two and a half million adults participated in a nutrition education campaign.³ In Brazil the national literacy programme, MOBRAL, reached thirty million adults between 1970 and 1978.⁴ Such examples illustrate the expansion that has taken place in adult education. This growth has occurred throughout the wide spectrum of fields that the concept of adult education encompasses, from basic education to professional training, from recreational activities to community development programmes.

The organisational structure of adult education remains very diverse in all countries. It stretches far beyond ministries of education to include other central government departments, local authorities, commerce and industry, trade unions, political parties, voluntary organisations and so forth. This organisational diversity makes it difficult to comprehend adult education as a whole. But grasping the essential unity of educational activities for adults is important because the recent rapid development of adult education has made it more integral to national systems of education. Indeed the expansion of educational opportunities beyond initial schooling for the young has contributed to education systems being conceived more and more as ‘lifelong’ systems which offer the possibility of ‘recurrent’ education at different points of the individual’s life-span.

To see the unity of adult education and to locate it within a national system is to understand why adult education must be regarded sociologically and politically as part of the single social institution that is education. This is not to deny that there are important differences between the education of adults and the education of children. For example, the education of adults is seldom compulsory, usually part-time, and frequently occurs in contexts which respond to particular interests. Also the social position of adults is different, for instance in their personal autonomy and their experience of work. But these differences are subsumed within the wider social institution that also involves children and which has other age-related differentiations, such as kindergarten education. Consideration of adult education has to take into account that it is a part of the organised processes in society which systematically shape consciousness, develop knowledge, impart skills, and form attitudes.

It is within this context that the role of adult education in society needs to be analysed. The world-wide expansion of state-funded education for the young since 1945 has led to the great salience of questions about the political implications of education. For instance, the student movement of the 1960s which challenged the nature of university education in the advanced capitalist countries reverberated in wider questions about the nature and functions of education. Similar questions were vigorously addressed in China during the Cultural Revolution in the period from 1966 to 1976. The issues raised can perhaps be summarised in a single question: to what extent (and in what ways) is education a force for reproducing the status quo or a force for social change? Because of adult education’s increased impact on social life, it is also faced more insistently by this question.

The political nature of adult education has received increasing attention since the early 1970s. The writings of Paulo Freire with their emphasis that no education is neutral have been particularly influential and some adult educators have begun to consider how adult education can contribute to social transformation. In doing so, as Hall has pointed out, they have started to recover a historical tradition in which adult education is linked to political action against capitalism.⁵ This tradition indicates that adult education has often been seen by socialists as an important front in the struggle to change society. For example, the growth of the labour movement in the industrialising countries of the nineteenth century led to active independent adult education programmes for workers, such as the Chartist meeting halls in England in the 1830s and the evening schools in Russia in the 1890s. Historical study shows that in different periods socialists have regarded adult education as a source of support for the economic and political struggle to overthrow capitalism and construct a socialist society. The re-emergence of this tradition in the 1970s has led more adult educators to consider the political implications of their own work. As Hall put it:

...in adult education, we may now have to look much closer at the role we are playing...As long as the share of the world’s wealth is so unevenly divided between those who rule and those who produce, there will be a struggle. We must know which side of the scale we are on.⁶

One result of this development has been a growing practical interest in the use of adult education as a means of advancing socialism in both the industrialised and underdeveloped countries. It is this interest which provides the rationale for this study.

A key problem facing socialist adult educators is how to achieve a unity of political theory and educational practice. In the burgeoning literature in English which considers adult education as a field of study, very few authors have taken an explicitly socialist perspective. The purpose of this book is therefore to contribute to the development within adult education of a socialist pedagogy, that is, an approach to teaching and learning which is based on principles consonant with socialist theory.⁷ This approach must be characterised by a distinctive perspective on matters such as the process of knowledge acquisition, the role of language and literacy, the social relations of the educational situation, the methods of teaching, the mode of evaluating learning and teaching, and the relation of learning to production and political action. The concept of a socialist pedagogy provides a politically-informed stance towards both the content and processes of the adult education encounter. Consistency between content and processes is important because an adult educator’s political position is not only expressed in the choice of subject matter and learning materials but it is also mediated by the methods used and social relationships established.

The need to unify content and processes has been discussed by Giroux in his chapter ‘Beyond the limits of radical educational reform: towards a critical theory of education.’⁸ Here he argues that on the educational left in North America ‘two major positions stand out: these can be loosely represented, on the one hand, by the content-focussed radicals and, on the other, by the strategy-based radicals.’⁹ He suggests that those who focus on content give priority to challenging the dominant ideology and developing critical ideas, while those who focus on strategy (i.e. processes) give priority to challenging the hierarchical social relations of the classroom and developing personal autonomy. He argues that it is incorrect to separate the two aspects of education, criticising the content-focussed group for failing to see the ideological dimensions of the learning experience itself, and the strategy-focussed group for failing to locate classroom social relations within a critical analysis of the wider society. He concludes that there is a need for an integrated approach which is underlain by a coherent political theory:

...any viable radical educational theory has got to point to the development of classroom interactions in which the pedagogical practices used are no less radical than the message transmitted through the specific content of the course. In brief, the content of classroom instruction must be paralleled by a pedagogical style which is consistent with a radical political vision.¹⁰

This is a conclusion which I regard as being of great relevance to adult education because the problem of achieving an integrated approach arose for socialist adult educators in many different contexts during the 1970s. The relationship of content and form has been the subject of argument. For example, Yarnit has criticised much of the community-based adult education in England in the 1970s for ‘an obsession with form at the expense of content’ which he feels reveals a ‘superficial radicalism’. He argues that socialist adult education must stress the content of what is taught:

To put content before form is not to deny the importance of pedagogy or to equate content with a perpetual diet of politics. It is merely to affirm that in the end if education is to grow deep roots in the working class then they will be nourished more by what people learn than by how they learn.¹¹

This example indicates that there is a tendency to dichotomise content and processes in socialist adult education which is similar to that identified by Giroux in radical school education. My aim in this book is to make a contribution to resolving this dichotomy.

This contribution consists of attempting to clarify the nature of a socialist pedagogy for adult education. Such a pedagogy seems to me to be less accessible to the adult educator at the moment than a socialist curriculum because most subject areas have their own body of socialist interpretation which can provide the basis for the selection and organisation of teaching content. My main concern is therefore with educational processes but this does not overlook the need to develop critical content. My focus is the analysis of learning theory in order to develop the principles of a socialist approach to adult education. However, before considering adult learning it is necessary to adopt a social theory which is fundamentally critical of capitalism and which can provide the broad theoretical framework within which to analyse educational issues.

Marxism as a Theoretical Framework

The theoretical position that I have adopted in seeking to develop a socialist approach to adult education is that of Marxism. Socialism as a concept is susceptible to different meanings although its common denominator, as Berki¹² has argued, is an opposition to capitalist society. A number of different socialist theories have arisen since the bourgeois economic and political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century established the capitalist epoch. The two main positions today are those of the social democrats and the Marxists. The social democrats envisage the possibility of a gradual reform of capitalism which will reduce its social injustice (for example, through the welfare state) while retaining its economic basis, namely private enterprise. The Marxists, on the other hand, see the necessity for a more fundamental transformation of society that will totally replace the capitalist mode of production by a new form of society, communism. This position is based on a well-developed theoretical tradition which provides both an overall explanation of society and the analytical principles for studying particular aspects of social existence. This seems to me to offer the most coherent and global account of capitalist society and how to change it, and in so doing it furnishes the conceptual tools for studying issues of education. It thus opens up the possibility of unifying theoretically a political goal for society at large with actual practices of adult education in specific social contexts. I have therefore adopted Marxism as the theoretical framework for this study, and I use the concept socialism to denote the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society as propounded by Marxism.

However, it is necessary to point out that Marxism is not a monolithic tradition. The writings of Marx and Engels between 1843 and 1895 were voluminous and the scope and time-scale of their work inevitably meant shifts in thinking, variations in analysis, and unfinished areas of investigation, despite the basic consistency of theoretical approach and political commitment. These ambiguities have been reflected in subsequent interpretations and applications, which exhibit many differences. The major figures of twentieth century Marxism include people such as Lenin, Lukacs, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao, Sartre, Althusser and Habermas whose writings represent a great diversity of views. But it is also true to say that attempts have been made to canonise the work of Marx and Engels and produce a single ‘correct’ version of Marxism. In particular, the use of their work as a unifying ideology by political parties has led to simplifications and dogmatism, so that Marxism has often been equated with the offical positions of Communist Parties, especially that of the Soviet Union (because of its historical role as the first Marxist party to achieve state power). But such ‘official’ versions tend towards a closed system of thought and to absolute truths which are in contradistinction to Lenin’s assertion of the open-ended quality of Marxism:

We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life.¹³

The very fact that theory...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Adult Education for Socialism
• Chapter 2. Marxism and Learning
• Chapter 3. Principles of a Marxist Approach to Adult Education
• Chapter 4. A Critique of Orthodox Approaches to Adult Learning
• Chapter 5. An Assessment of Freire’s Pedagogy
• Chapter 6. Adult Education and Socialist Pedagogy
• Chapter 7. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• General Index