All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

75
Adult Education and Politics
Richard Wells, The Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies
A Review of:
The Struggle for Democracy
in Adult Education
Edited by Dianne Ramdeholl,
Tania Giordani, Thomas Heaney
and Wendy Yanow
Does adult education have a political
purpose The seat-of-the-pants
answer is yes. To teach adults is to
teach a segment of the population that, for
a host of reasons, does not have access to a
traditional college experience. By providing
that access, programs in adult education
broaden individual horizons. The more
students they reach, at least in theory, the
more they contribute to the democratization
of a culture.
This is a vague but reasonable enough
place to start an assessment of what,
exactly, can be political about adult
education. But right away it raises two
other important questions: What do we
mean by a democratic culture And if it’s
true that what we have now, in the U.S.
anyway, does not live up to our definition,
how can adult education contribute to
the struggle for the kind of social change
that would get us there This volume of
New Directions for Adult and Continuing
Education, co-edited by Empire State
College School for Graduate Studies Mentor
Dianne Ramdeholl, sheds light on these very
questions. Moreover, the essays, which range
from a theoretical discussion of democracy
itself to reflections on particular programs
and practices to critical analyses of attempts
to “democratize” adult education planning
and administration, force us to consider the
broader political economic circumstances
in which adult education programs must
operate. Doing so not only gives us a
more concrete sense of what popular adult
education programs can do in the name
of democracy. It reminds us that, however
democratic their internal structure, adult
education programs only gain real political
leverage when they help create a social
movement by joining forces with other
popular institutions.
Two of the essays, one by Thomas Heaney
and the other by Arthur Wilson and Ronald
M. Cervero, provide important insight into
the challenges of administering and planning
adult education programs democratically,
that is, in a way that incorporates the
voices of students and staff into curriculum
design and overall decision making. Both
present cases that don’t offer clear cut
answers; in fact, they may indeed raise more
questions about how, exactly, to structure
an educational program democratically –
but that may be a good thing. Despite a
lot of messiness and seeming inefficiency,
administrators need to continually engage all
program stake holders, since this is both the
best way to run a program in the interests of
the students, and the best way to “model”
democracy on a broader scale.
But what might that broader democracy
look like, and how would adult education
get us there The opening essay, by
leading critical theorist of adult education
Stephen Brookfield, takes this question
on in two ways. First, Brookfield focuses
on the communicative practices that, in
his estimation, produce and constitute a
democratic system. There must be equal
access to information, there must be
inclusiveness, and the conversation itself
must be expansive. In other words, there
must be a healthy respect for the different
perspectives people bring to the table and a
willingness to engage in an “ever-widening”
discussion, one that moves toward questions
about how best to organize “social,
economic and political affairs” (p. 5). Here
Brookfield appeals to Jurgen Habermas’
notion of the “ideal speech situation,” that
moment in time when knowledge is evenly
distributed, the stakes fairly apportioned,
and all voices are heard, even when they
are calling on the “gritty, messy details of
individual lives” (p. 9). Second, Brookfield
rightly insists that democracy has a less
procedural, less discursive, more material
component. Real democracy also means
that “vast disparities in wealth” have been
abolished, and “all forms of resources” have
come “under common control” (p. 6).
However welcome such an arrangement
might be, it is of course rather difficult to
achieve in practical-political terms because
of how entrenched inequality is in the
society we now have. As many of us now
know, achieving a critical appreciation
of that inequality through participatory
dialogue, critique, etc., in an educational
setting is one thing (and not always a
success, for that matter); garnering the
effective power to create the necessary
changes in that social world, even if that
world is just the city or town in which the
students live, is quite another. Brookfield
doesn’t confront this problem, making his
juxtaposition of the “discursive” and the
“material” qualities of democracy seem
rather loose.
The analytical fissure between, say, an
ideal speech situation (or a participatory
classroom) and economic justice firmly
established is indicative of a similar caesura
in the work of Paulo Freire himself.
“Problem posing education,” wrote Freire
in Pedogogy of the Oppressed (1973), “is a
revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic”
(p. 72). Here, dialogue-based pedagogy is
not only inherently liberatory, the kind of
liberation being pursued is undefined, as
are the political and economic forces lined
up against it. As adult educator Rachel
Martin has argued, Freire tends to take for
granted the relationship between oppressor
and oppression, and leaves both sides of
the binary pretty much unexamined. This
is not to say that there aren’t oppressors
and oppressed in today’s world. It is to
say the relationship works out differently
in different times and places, and to help
students grasp the forces and institutions
involved requires both a pedagogical
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011