Posts Tagged john dewey
The Role of Adult Education Centres
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” The famous quote of John Dewey simply says it all. Society is dependent on its individuals and education plays an important role in developing communities. Education provides humans with the ability to improve their performance and lifestyle by making informed choices and by forming opinion on political issues concerning themselves. Developed nations invest heavily on education as they realize the importance of providing education to their citizens.
In the UK there are many adult education centres that deal with the education of adults in the workplace, through continuing education courses at colleges, universities or lifelong learning centres. Adult education is often referred to as ‘second-chance’ or ‘training and development’ and many schools offer tailor-made courses and learning programs for the returning learners. Hence, these adult education centres play a vital role in society since education contributes to the development of communities.
Adult education is different from traditional children’s education since adults have accumulated knowledge, and work experience which adds to their learning experience. They often apply their knowledge practically to learn more effectively. For instance in the 1990s when PCs were newly introduced many adults, mostly office workers, enrolled in computer training to learn the basic use of the operating system or specific application software. Most of the adult education centres provide one to one tutoring and small group sessions for adults.
Continuing education is also called further education in the UK, which refers to post-secondary learning activities and programs. The post-secondary learning activities include degree credit courses by non-traditional students, non-degree career training, workforce training, on-campus and online formal personal enrichment courses, self-directed learning through Internet interest groups, clubs or personal research activities, and experiential learning as applied to problem solving. The method of delivery of continuing education can include traditional types of classroom lectures and laboratories.
However, mostly continuing education is offered through distance learning, including videotaped/CD-ROM material, broadcast programming, online/Internet delivery and online Interactive Courses. Continuing education is basically for those adult learners who are beyond the traditional undergraduate college or university age. However, further education assumes adults have basic education and are continuing with their education hence it does not include basic instruction such as literacy, English language skills, or programs such as vocational training.
Dewey And Habermas On Educational Binarisms
My interests in the relations obtaining between personal desires and the engagement with learning are traceable to my own experiences of returning to education as an adult. After leaving school at 16, with no expectation that I would ever go to university, I worked for 12 years in industry. I returned to education and enrolled at a university after becoming unemployed during the economic downturn of the early 1990s. I well remember the clear sense I had of wishing to study a particular kind of subject; something in no way related to my past career; and which would ideally be utterly lacking, for me at least, in any sense of being work-related. This was the means through which I would strive to change the trajectory of my life. However, with hindsight and an enhanced capacity for reflexive analysis, I am now acutely aware that my decision to study the subjects that I did – and for ‘their own sake’ – was underpinned by these very concrete, personal, objectives.
In the event, I was fortunate. I secured a good degree, a teaching qualification, and a masters degree. After teaching at an independent college, I again returned to university to teach and to research for a Ph.D., and sought to apply the skills and knowledge I had accumulated, together with the insights afforded through my own experiences, to furthering my understanding of the experiences of adult learners. During my research, and in conversations with my informants, I took the opportunity to explore the nature of the relationship between desire, motivation, and the engagement with learning, and to review how educational theorists typically approach this question. Among the thinkers who have considered the relations obtaining between particular conceptions of ‘what education is for’, John Dewey and JÜrgen Habermas are worth attention.
Dewey and Habermas strive to synthesise the academy’s ‘pure’ and ‘practical’ ends, though both also recognise that the ultimate justification for our system of education (again, here, the academy) should, and indeed does, amount to more than the sum of these two social purposes. For Dewey, a principle concern is that education fosters democracy, in the broadest sense, and that the academy is thus characterised by democratic relationships. Habermas, too, regards issues of democracy as fundamental, for it is democracy that facilitates universities as “communities of reason” in which “values are always under discussion”.[i] What emerges in the ideas of Dewey and Habermas is a picture of the academy in which its raison d’être is not construed as a simple choice between the ‘pure’ and the ‘practical’, but one in which these aims are melded, and are pursued and combined within a community, the denizens of which are encouraged go beyond this simple binarism and to develop and to apply democratically the faculty of reason.
Despite the force of Dewey’s and Habermas’s arguments, Ostovich demonstrates that the essentially binary conception of education with which they take issue, and which is deeply rooted in antiquity, remains in broad circulation. Moreover, versions of this binarism are apparent not only in discussions of the relations between education and wider society, but also in analyses of individuals’ motivations in engaging with learning. In an article written in 1973, W.K. Frankena clearly seeks to establish a ‘pure’ versus ‘practical’ binary distinction at both the societal and individual levels, despite confusedly imbuing each of the categories he identifies with a broadly instrumental tenor. Frankena notes that education has been traditionally construed as having four purposes. The first and third of these, as he recounts them, consist of the material advancement of the individual or of wider society, whilst the second and fourth consist of the moral and virtuous advancement of society and of the individual, respectively.[ii] Whilst Frankena makes the common error of confusing one form of instrumentalism with another, it is clear from his subsequent remarks that his intention is to draw a distinction between broadly Sophist and Platonic conceptions of education. He therefore continues in a vein that is prescient of much in current discourse:
“(This debate) is still with us in the question whether the emphasis in education should be on method or skill, or on knowledge and truth… At any rate, many ‘consumers’, if not thinkers about education, seem to conceive of it as a tool or toy, much as the Sophists did.”[iii]