Radicalizing Learning E-Book

Stephen D. Brookfield

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 473

Beschreibung

Radicalizing Learning calls for a total rethinking of what the field of adult education stands for and how adult educators should assess their effectiveness. Arguing that major changes in society are needed to create a more just world, the authors set out to show how educators can help learners envision and enact this radical transformation. Specifically, the book explores the areas of adult learning, training, teaching, facilitation, program development, and research. Each chapter provides a guide to the different paradigms and perspectives that prevail across the field of theory and practice. The authors then tie all of the themes into how adult learning for participatory democracy works in a diverse society.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

PREFACE

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS

OUR AUDIENCE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHAPTER ONE - CONCEPTUALIZING ADULT LEARNING AND EDUCATION

THE MEANING OF RADICAL

ADULT EDUCATION AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

WHAT MAKES ADULT LEARNING RADICAL?

AN EXAMPLE OF THE RADICAL PRACTICE OF ADULT LEARNING: NELSON MANDELA

CHAPTER TWO - UNDERSTANDING ADULT LEARNING

LEARNING LIBERATION

TRANSFORMATIVE ADULT LEARNING

CRITICAL REFLECTION

SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER THREE - UNDERSTANDING ADULT DEVELOPMENT

ADULT DEVELOPMENT: AN EMPIRICAL OR NORMATIVE CONCEPT?

A RADICAL APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT

TEACHING FOR RADICAL DEVELOPMENT

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER FOUR - LEARNING IN THE CONTEXT OF TRAINING

DEFINING AND DEBATING TRAINING

EXAMPLES OF RADICAL TRAINING

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER FIVE - PLANNING EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS

PRINCIPLES OF PROGRAM PLANNING

GOALS OF PROGRAM PLANNING

CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING PROGRAMS

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER SIX - TEACHING ADULTS

TEACHING AS RADICAL FUNCTION

TEACHING AS RADICAL FORM

PRACTICES OF RADICAL TEACHING

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER SEVEN - GLOBALIZATION AND ADULT LEARNING

TWO ADULT EDUCATION NARRATIVES OF GLOBALIZATION

A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF GLOBALIZATION

ADULT EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING

CHAPTER EIGHT - AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING

THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION

THE AESTHETICS OF LIBERATION

THE EDUCATIONAL FUNCTIONS OF RADICAL AESTHETICS

SUBVERTING FROM WITHIN: PAUL ROBESON

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER NINE - RESEARCHING LEARNING

EXAMPLES OF RESEARCH FOR RADICAL ADULT EDUCATION

PRINCIPLES FOR A PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH

CHAPTER TEN - ADULT LEARNING IN A DIVERSE WORLD

REPRESSIVE TOLERANCE IN ACTION

PRACTICING LIBERATING TOLERANCE

IDEOLOGICAL DETOXIFICATION

CONFRONTING DIFFERENCE

DISMANTLING PRIVILEGE

CONCLUSION

EPILOGUE

REFERENCES

NAME INDEX

SUBJECT INDEX

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brookfield, Stephen.

Radicalizing learning : adult education for a just world / Stephen D. Brookfield, John D. Holst. p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7879-9825-7 (cloth)

1. Adult education—United States. 2. Adult learning—United States. 3. Critical pedagogy—United States. I. Holst, John D. II. Title.

LC5251.B74 2010

374’.015—dc22

2010021299

The Jossey-Bass

Higher and Adult Education Series

PREFACE

As we were writing this book, two momentous events happened in the United States. The first was the meltdown of the banking and investment sector, some would say the near collapse of capitalism itself. The other was the election of the first biracial president. These two events intersected as President Obama attempted to regulate the operations of the financial sector (banks, insurance companies, and investment capital) and to reform the largely private health care system. Both these relatively mild attempts to curb the worst excesses of capitalism were met with a tide of criticism from the right, whose representatives quickly invoked the terms socialism and socialistic to condemn Obama’s reforms. Their invocation was intended to show that Obama’s proposals curbed individual freedom and went against the deep grain of liberty itself invoked so frequently as characterizing U.S. culture.

The two of us were alternately amused and bewildered by these criticisms. First, it was amusing to hear the term socialism applied to reforms designed to keep capitalism intact and to expand the customer base of private health insurance companies. The self-righteous indignation frothing from the lips of commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck was hilariously misdirected, given that nothing remotely socialistic was on view. Second, it was bewildering to witness the fear and loathing that the word socialism invoked, particularly since the concept had been declared dead and buried with the collapse of the former Soviet Union. For an idea supposed to have been consigned to the graveyard of history, the twitching of the corpse appeared to have enough life to induce a frenetic fit of the vapors.

As the two of us began to talk about the book now in your hands, we realized that this temporary attention to the idea of socialism was in some ways fortuitous. Out of nowhere, socialism was now a part of the public discourse again in a way that it hadn’t been since the start of the century. Even if the word was a sort of instigator of moral panic, it was still being used and was linked to the regulation of the banking, investment, and insurance industries, and to the provision of decent health care for the good of all. Both the bailouts and government takeovers of banks and insurance companies instigated by George W. Bush and the proposal for a publicly funded health care option were described as socialist. So from being unused and effectively outlawed, the word had suddenly jumped to the status of being a descriptor that the right wing was using to characterize the actions of both a highly conservative president and a self-described, bipartisan, democratic centrist president. All of a sudden, socialism was back as a shorthand term for the regulation of services and allocation of resources for the good of the majority. As you will see as you move through the book, we believe that figuring out what an authentic—and very democratic—socialism looks like is at the heart of what we understand as a radical approach. A radical approach breaks with an ethic of individualistic self-interest to ask “How should we act toward each other to promote the common good?” Answering that question leads to considering collective and cooperative ways of living and learning.

The two of us work at a university where fostering the common good is part of our mission statement. So we had often talked about what the common good represented and how it implicitly foregrounded collective compassion and responsibility. We had also been talking about the way that adult education discourse had seemed to veer to the right and the way that what had once seemed to be a mainstream idea in the field—that adult education’s historic role was to help create and then defend democracy against the rise of unrepresentative elites—now appeared either daringly radical or dangerously passé. Our conversations moved toward what it meant to think, and more importantly, act as a radical adult educator. If radicalism represented a fundamental shift in the nature of the world, then the traditional project of adult education—creating and extending a genuinely participatory democracy—now seemed more radical than ever. And, since part of realizing democracy was (as Myles Horton was fond of arguing) creating economic democracy, it was impossible for us to explore radical adult education without considering democratic economic arrangements, particularly socialism. An economic democracy is one in which everyone is involved in deciding how the resources of society are to be distributed and allocated for the common good, which is as good a shorthand definition of socialism as you can get.

We think linking adult education to democratic socialism is radical for five reasons.

1. It challenges the dominance of capitalist ideology as representing the “natural” way of ordering economic life that ultimately rebounds to the interest of all. We grow up believing that capitalism guards liberty and guarantees individual freedom, so learning to question that belief requires some serious critical thinking.

2. It envisages a future that marks a qualitative break with the present. Democratic socialism requires a complete and deep-rooted reordering of society and the economy so that it is fundamentally different than it was before. Such a change deserves to be described as transformation.

3. It positions the practice of adult education in a way that stands in opposition to current ways of organizing programs and classes in that it emphasizes collective and collaborative work.

4. It requires a total rethinking of what the field stands for and how adult educators should assess their effectiveness. Adult education now becomes much more of an effort to illuminate, and then challenge, asymmetrical power relations.

5. It requires adult educators to undertake a serious political detoxification to free themselves (as much as that is possible) from a very successful program of ideological manipulation that has equated anything socialist with a form of totalitarian thought control that imposes top-down conformity and squashes creativity and difference.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

The book is intended to serve as an overview of the theory and practice of adult education interpreted from one particular perspective that we call radical. As such, it is designed to be a contemporary and comprehensive treatment of practices and ideas that comprise the understanding and facilitation of adult learning. We wanted to write a book that could stand as an introductory textbook to the field in that it included all the topics that adult education textbooks traditionally cover. These would be adult learning, adult development, program planning, training, teaching, and research. In each of the chapters on these topics we explore how these processes can be understood and practiced to help people learn what it means to participate fully in a genuine political and economic democracy. We begin by conceptualizing adult learning and development and then move to the analysis of training, program development, and teaching. The book then turns to exploring the impact of technology and globalization and forms of artistic expression. We end by analyzing how learning can be researched and how adult learning for participatory democracy works in a diverse society.

We call this book Radicalizing Learning: Adult Education for a Just World because we want our focus to be on the purposeful learning adults undertake in pursuit of political and economic democracy, whether or not that occurs within programs described as adult education. Much of our attention is on social movements and on organizing that takes place outside of formal institutions, and much of that is self-directed—guided by experimentation and trial and error without the benefit or guidance of an experienced teacher. For us, adult learning is inextricably tied to creating and extending political and economic democracy—to equalizing democratic control of and access to wealth, education, health care, and creative work, and to promoting collective and cooperative forms of decision making and labor. This is perhaps seen most clearly in community movements. Every act of adult learning in such a movement entails alternating and intersecting dimensions. When adults learn how to create a tenants’ organization, build a grassroots coalition of environmental groups to stop a corporate-sponsored change in land use, organize a series of “take back the night” vigils, set up bar-room classes to teach literacy for voter registration, mobilize a citizen army to fight apartheid, establish a worker’s cooperative in Turin, Clydeside, or Nova Scotia, they increase knowledge, skill, and insight. None of these activities is wholly technical, communicative, emancipatory, or emotional in terms of the learning that ensues; instead, each involves a complex web of actions, choices, and reasoning, with different forms and processes highlighted more strongly than others at different times. Our book begins by proposing this kind of learning as being particularly important and then works backward to explore how it is best encouraged, including the role of program planning, teaching and training in that endeavor.

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS

We open the book in Chapter One with an analysis of the term radical from two dimensions: getting down to the roots of a phenomenon to rediscover its essential nature or purpose and envisaging a qualitative transformation of society and the economy. We introduce the idea of democratic socialism and consider what it means to learn how to exercise common control and stewardship of resources. In so doing, we argue that the values of fairness, creativity, inclusion, and difference are central, and we provide examples of radical adult learning, particularly that of Nelson Mandela. Chapter Two considers further the meaning of radical adult learning and how this involves recognizing and challenging dominant ideology, particularly as people build grassroots coalitions and collective economic forms. We then consider the intersection of these ideas with three prominent conceptualizations of adult learning in the field—transformative learning, critical reflection, and self-direction.

Adult development is the focus of Chapter Three. In this chapter we explain how we see normative and empirical elements as being always interwoven in understandings of development. We also argue that the concept of development can be reframed in a way that grounds it in the normative pursuit of true democracy—a democracy that is participatory and economic. Our interpretation of development from a radical perspective links it to collective identity development, to developing agency, and to the development of collective forms. The chapter ends with a discussion of how to teach for radical development.

Discussions of training are often excluded in texts on radical education because of its corporate connotations and its association with top-down, authoritarian approaches. Chapter Four challenges this conceptualization and argues that training has long occupied a central place in radical practice. We provide examples of this such as the citizenship schools in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the Nicaraguan literacy crusade, the landless workers movement of Brazil, and the Argentinian recovered factory movement. In Chapter Five we turn our attention to program planning and begin by establishing the central principles of radical program planning—critical self reflection, internationalism, love, discipline, flexibility, and sacrifice. These are terms very different from those usually contained in program planning texts, and they suggest specific practices. We then explore goals of program planning, such as promoting the political independence of working-class people, understanding the dynamics and trajectory of social and political change, understanding one’s contributions to those dynamics and trajectory, and working with social movements. The chapter ends with an analysis of criteria for program evaluation including working with the demands of the dispossessed, establishing connections with wider struggles, building political independence, and developing leadership.

Teachers and the process of teaching are the foci of Chapter Six. We begin by outlining the functions of radical teaching and discuss what might comprise the elements of a radical curriculum. The chapter then turns to what radical teaching looks like. We try to establish its central practices and argue that it must not be confused with experimentation for experimentation’s sake, or with students simply deciding what should be studied and how this should happen. Chapter Seven widens the context of the book to an analysis of the impact on globalization of adult learning. It includes a discussion of a political economy of globalization—an understanding of political process as shaped by economic forces—and argues that microchip technology represents a qualitative change in the nature of capitalism. The growing informal sector of the economy—those in temporary, fluctuating, independent, and seasonal work—is proposed as a new focus for adult educators.

The aesthetic dimension of adult learning is the focus of Chapter Eight. We begin by drawing on the work of Herbert Marcuse who argued that important radical transformation could be triggered by artistic encounters that lifted people out of the realm of everyday experience. We follow this with example of radical art drawn from music and the visual arts and then argue for several functions of radical aesthetics—sounding warnings, building solidarity, claiming empowerment, providing alternative epistemologies, affirming pride, and teaching history. The chapter ends by considering the work of the activist artist Paul Robeson.

What research for radical adult education looks like is explored in Chapter Nine. We look at the ways participatory action research was conducted by Ella Baker, Nelson Peery, Paulo Freire, and in the labor movement. From our exploration we derive epistemological and methodological principles for participatory research, and we then propose key questions that should guide radical participatory research. Chapter Ten is the last full-length chapter, and it considers how diversity can sometimes be used to blunt radical progress even as it appears to be revolutionary. We establish three projects for radical diversity—ideological detoxification, confronting difference, and dismantling privilege—and consider in some detail W.E.B. DuBois’ work censored by the American Association for Adult Education in the 1930s. The book concludes with an Epilogue that looks to the future for adult education in creating a just world.

OUR AUDIENCE

Our audience is all those who are interested in understanding better how people learn to challenge mainstream ideology and how they then learn to build democratic, participatory, and collective social and economic forms. In more specific terms, we think the book will be useful to graduate students new to the field of adult education who are seeking to understand its historical purpose. We think educators with an activist agenda—particularly those in social movements, the media, community organizations, and workplace learning programs will find something of interest in here. We can see this book being used by staff, volunteers, and activists in churches, in health care organizations, in labor unions, in economic and housing cooperatives, in tenants’ associations, and in community development—in fact in any situation in which people are learning to assert their rights against corporate capitalism, unresponsive bureaucracy, and mainstream media. Educators who identify themselves as critical pedagogues will find this helpful as will political and civic educators trying to encourage grassroots conversation about what education or truly democratic citizenship looks like. Environmental educators, queer activists, and cultural and community arts workers should also find it instructive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stephen Brookfield offers his greatest acknowledgment to John Holst for collaborating with him on this book. Over numerous fish-and-chip lunches at Brits Pub in Minneapolis, John provided a constant stream of ideas and criticism that Stephen benefitted from enormously. John tightened up Stephen’s thinking and introduced him to whole areas of practice and theory he had little or no awareness of. Stephen also thanks his bandmates in The 99ers—Molly Holley and Colin Selhurst—for understanding when rehearsals needed to be cut short and gigs refused because of deadlines imposed by the manuscript’s completion. Finally, Stephen thanks Kim Miller for always being ready to remind him that the adulation of the crowd (or at least the scattered groups he is sometimes invited to address) means nothing next to the microreality of his daily actions and choices.

John Holst would like to first and foremost acknowledge his appreciation for Stephen’s generous willingness to collaborate with him on this project. Stephen took the decisive steps in concretizing our long discussed plans for collaboration by coming up with the specific plan and outline of this book. Moreover, Stephen’s expectations of clarity in the writing and in the presentation of ideas have been of enduring benefit. In terms of his own contributions, John would also like to acknowledge the significant debt he owes to Stephen and to all the exemplary educators referenced in these pages.

We thank the Adult Education Quarterly and the International Journal of Lifelong Education for allowing us to publish elements of this text that appeared in the form of articles in their pages.

We both know that thanks to editors often appear pro forma, but any readers who know our editor, David Brightman, will understand just how important his supportive critique was to this book. David was unfailingly helpful, full of useful ideas for the book’s organization, and ready to ask provocative questions that helped us make the book what it is. In contrast to most acknowledgments that add a disclaimer to the effect that the people named had no responsibility for how the book finally appeared in print, we want to affirm that this is David’s book as well as our own.

Stephen D. Brookfield and John D. Holst Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Stephen D. Brookfield The father of Molly and Colin, and the husband of Kim, Stephen D. Brookfield is currently Distinguished University Professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, where he recently won the university’s Diversity Leadership Teaching and Research Award and also the John Ireland Presidential Award for Outstanding Achievement as a Teacher/Scholar. He received his B.A. degree (1970) from Coventry University in modern studies, his M.A. degree (1974) from the University of Reading in sociology, and his Ph.D. degree (1980) from the University of Leicester in adult education. He also holds a postgraduate diploma (1971) from the University of London, Chelsea College, in modern social and cultural studies and a postgraduate diploma (1977) from the University of Nottingham in adult education. In 1991 he was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University System of New Hampshire for his contributions to understanding adult learning. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Concordia University for his contributions to adult education.

Stephen began his teaching career in 1970 and has held appointments at colleges of further, technical, adult, and higher education in the United Kingdom, and at universities in Canada (University of British Columbia) and the United States (Columbia University, Teachers College and the University of St. Thomas). In 1989 he was visiting fellow at the Institute for Technical and Adult Teacher Education in what is now the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. In 2002 he was visiting professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. In 2003-2004 he was the Helen Le Baron Hilton Chair at Iowa State University. He has run numerous workshops on teaching, adult learning, and critical thinking around the world and delivered many keynote addresses at regional, national, and international education conferences. In 2001 he received the Leadership Award from the Association for Continuing Higher Education (ACHE) for “extraordinary contributions to the general field of continuing education on a national and international level.” In 2008 he was awarded the Morris T. Keeton Award of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning for “significant contributions to the field of adult and experiential learning.” In 2009 he was inducted into the International Adult Education Hall of Fame in a ceremony in Philadelphia.

Stephen is a four-time winner of the Cyril O. Houle World Award for Literature in Adult Education: in 1986 for his book Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning: A Comprehensive Analysis of Principles and Effective Practices (1986), in 1989 for Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting (1987), in 1996 for Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (1995), and in 2005 for The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching (2004). Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning also won the 1986 Imogene E. Okes Award for Outstanding Research in Adult Education. These awards were all presented by the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. The first edition of Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms (2nd edition, 2005), which he coauthored with Stephen Preskill, was a 1999 Critics Choice of the Educational Studies Association. His other books are Adult Learners, Adult Education and the Community (1984); Self-Directed Learning: From Theory to Practice (1985); Learning Democracy: Eduard Lindeman on Adult Education and Social Change (1987); Training Educators of Adults: The Theory and Practice of Graduate Adult Education (1988); The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom (2nd. edition, 2006); Teaching Reflectively in Theological Contexts: Promises and Contradictions (coedited with Mary Hess, 2008); Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (coauthored with Stephen Preskill, 2008); and Handbook of Race and Adult Education (coedited with Vanessa Sheared, Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Scipio A.J. Colin III, and Elizabeth Peterson, 2010).

John D. Holst John D. Holst is currently an associate professor in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Administration at the University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches graduate courses in critical pedagogy, social theory, and educational research. He received his B.S. degree (1988) in U.S. history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an emphasis on labor and women’s history, his M.S. degree (1994) in adult continuing education from Northern Illinois University, with an emphasis on urban adult education, and his Ed.D. degree (2000) from Northern Illinois University.

John Holst entered the informal field of adult education in 1984 as a social movement activist by working in the student, labor, anti-Apartheid, and Central American solidarity movements. He entered the formal field of adult education in 1988 as an instructor of English as a Second Language in community- and work-based adult education in Chicago. While teaching in factory lunchrooms, hotels, church basements, and government and nongovernmental organizations, John became actively involved in the labor union of adult educators at the City Colleges of Chicago.

He is the author of the book Social Movements, Civil Society, and Radical Adult Education (2002). In addition, he is the author of several book chapters and articles which have appeared in the Adult Education Quarterly, the International Journal of Lifelong Learning, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and the Harvard Educational Review. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian. He is a Houle Scholar Fellow (2001-2003) and, as such, he is currently working on the forthcoming text Globalization and the Future of Radical Adult Education.

CHAPTER ONE

CONCEPTUALIZING ADULT LEARNING AND EDUCATION

We live in interesting times. The election of the nation’s first biracial president, the apparent collapse of capitalism (apparent, not actual, owing to the massive government bailout of financial institutions that “are so big they can’t be allowed to fail”), immersion in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and regular accusations from cable news commentators that we are on the verge of socialism in the U.S.—a claim viewed with much bemusement by European socialists. In a sense, these times begat this book. It has its genesis in the reactions of the two of us to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and Britain. One of us was born in the United States, the other born in England, and, as CNN beamed footage of the troops entering Baghdad, we asked ourselves how it had come to pass that these two countries had acted in direct defiance of the world and, in the case of Britain, in defiance of the clear majority of its citizens. As adult educators, both of us were concerned to explore the kinds of learning people undertook in order to organize mass protests against the war and the way they learned to fight back against the Bush and Blair administrations’ ideological push.

As it happened, the Australian Mike Newman beat us to the punch publishing his magnificent Teaching Defiance (2006). But 2003 was the spur for the two of us to do a great deal of thinking about the way adult education seems to have lost its moorings and become uncoupled from its traditional, mainstream view of itself as a movement to create and build democracy. It also prompted us to think a lot about adult education’s traditional concern to develop critical thinkers and the responsibility this necessarily entails of countering any process of brainwashing or ideological manipulation. This book is our attempt to remind ourselves, and the field, of how adult learning and the practice of adult education have traditionally been concerned with the health of participatory democracy. Indeed, for many adult educators across the world the most important project for the field, and the most significant contribution of adult learning, has been learning how to extend participatory democracy into the economic sphere, that is, with the creation of democratic and cooperative socialism.

These days, to talk of adult learning and education in the same breath as democracy or socialism can seem either hopelessly out of date (after all, many would say adult education should be focused on “skilling” or “retooling” America’s workforce to compete in the global economy) or completely utopian (especially when viewed in the light of where federal and state funds overwhelmingly go for adult education—that is, to workforce training or basic skills). That this has not always been the case can be seen by studying what in previous decades were the writings of “mainstream” adult educators such as Lyman Bryson. Bryson, a well-published professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, was very active in the chief professional organization of his day, the American Association for Adult Education (AAAE).

In 1936 Lyman Bryson published his landmark text simply titled Adult Education in which he urged teachers of adults to inculcate principles of rational skepticism in adult learners that would help them “to stand firmly against the winds of doctrine” (p. 64). The mark of a good teacher for Bryson was the degree to which she helped adult students “to acquire a more alert attitude toward their already accepted and verbalized beliefs, and toward all new things offered them” (p. 65). The ability to do this was “the hall-mark of a fit teacher for grown men and women” (p. 65). In other words, adult education was about teaching people to resist dominant ideology—such as that capitalism was a natural way of ordering the economic affairs of society and ultimately worked to the benefit of all, that the massive amount of material wealth possessed by the United States permitted it to act as an imperial invader, and that we live in a society distinguished by vigorous freedom of the press. In pursuing these aims, however, Bryson warned that teachers of adults would earn the dislike, criticism, and ridicule of society and its leaders. Bryson was as mainstream as it is possible to get in the field in the 1930s, a fact illustrated by his pressuring Alain Locke to prohibit the publication of a manuscript by W.E.B. DuBois in the African Negro Folk Associates Series of the American Association for Adult Education (a manuscript we view as crucial to the conceptualization of the field and that we examine in this book) because of its Marxism and Pan-Africanism (see Guy, 1993; Guy and Brookfield, 2009). Yet 70 years after Bryson wrote Adult Education, he now sounds daringly radical. That is a damning indictment of how conservative and fearful the field has become.

THE MEANING OF RADICAL

Most discussions of the term radical begin by saying it means getting down to the roots of something to discover its essence. In this sense, radical adult education would mean returning to the roots of adult education to rediscovering its essential purpose and mission. But what comprises the roots of the field depends very much on whose history is being consulted. For every historical example of mechanics institutes or worker cooperatives, one could cite counterexamples of adult education for cultural genocide or for the education of an officer class of an occupying army. The question is whose roots we are getting back to and whose purposes and practices we seek to rediscover. So, clearly, we need establish at the start of this book what we mean by radical.

Lens begins his book Radicalism in America (1969) declaring that “the role of the radical throughout the ages has been as an antidote to privilege” (p. 1) and that “where the byword for the reactionary is self-interest, for the radical it is equality—either full equality in which all things are held in common, or, short of that, equality of opportunity. To level the material differences between men (sic), to replace hate with love, division with unity, war with peace—these have been the goals of the radical” (p. 1). Like Lens, we link radicalism to the abolition of privilege and creation of full material equality and, like him, we believe this entails two intertwined ideas: democracy and socialism. In his analysis Lens states “until early in the nineteenth century the radical fought in the main for a subversive concept called democracy; subsequently it was a subversive concept called socialism” (pp. 2-3). For us the radical purpose and practice of adult education is concerned with organizing education for and encouraging learning about the creation of democracy in political, cultural, and economic spheres. Political and cultural democracy entails learning how to recognize and abolish privilege around race, gender, status, and identity; economic democracy entails learning how to abolish material inequality and privilege around class. Both, in turn, entail the collective determination of how societal resources are to be used for the common good—in shorthand terms, socialism.

In one sense, this commitment to participatory political democracy and collective economic democracy (socialism) can’t really be regarded as radical if by that term we mean returning to the roots of the field in the U.S. Quite simply, the U.S. has never had the creation of economic democracy—whether that be called participatory economics or parecon (Albert, 2003), cooperative economics or democratic socialism—as the chief project of adult education. Political democracy has been valorized and relatively uncontested, but not economic democracy. To argue for that has been seen as too radical in a country in which, apart from “blips” such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, capitalism has been unquestioningly celebrated as the most liberating and free of all economic forms. There have always been those in the field who saw adult education as education for economic democracy, or socialism, of course, but we would argue that they have never represented the field’s mainstream.

In contrast, Stephen Brookfield grew up in England where the legacy of Mansbridge, Tawney, and Williams was the predominant tradition. Even though many see the hugely influential Workers’ Education Association (WEA) as liberal rather than progressive, for him the connection of adult education to democratic socialism was quite clear and not very daring or remarkable. Socialism and patriotism were never seen as opposed, and the idea that citizens have basic survival needs met was viewed as blindingly obvious. Even Tony Blair, as he campaigned for his first term of office as British prime minister, felt compelled to speak about the kind of socialism he wanted (market-driven socialism that rewarded entrepreneurship).

ADULT EDUCATION AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

Of course our thinking of adult education as a force for political detoxification, or as an element in any significant oppositional movement, represents our own agenda as adult educators. Many in the field would profoundly disagree with this agenda and advance completely different views concerning the proper purposes for adult education. They might claim that adult educators should be neutral and should stay out of or be above politics. They might argue that the most useful purpose of adult education is to equip adult workers with the skills they need to flourish in the global economy of the 21st century. For some of the most influential, adult education’s location is within the workplace, particularly corporate training, rather than in oppositional, grassroots movements.

Adult education is, like all sectors of organized education, a contested sphere. Different actors within this sphere have contrasting and sometimes contradictory agendas. However, no matter what the setting—an auto-repair class, a basic skills literacy program, a community meeting held to decide how to oppose the building of a Wal-Mart, an executive development seminar, an extension agent teaching crop rotation techniques, an antiracist agit-prop theater piece, a union organizer explaining procedures to unionize—the adult education tradition insists that these things happen democratically. The core purpose of adult education for the two of us is to build participatory democracy, and to that degree we are well in the historical mainstream. The break from that mainstream comes from our contention that democracy can only be realized if it is economic as well as political, which is where socialism comes in.

For us socialism and democracy are inseparable, and this is why to talk about adult education for democracy is, in our view, to talk about adult education for socialism. We are not alone in this, of course. For example, Myles Horton recognized the inseparability of socialism and democracy when he constantly stressed that political democracy is meaningless without its economic counterpart. But it is hard to focus on exactly what comprises a socialist perspective. As reviewers of socialism in the U.S. (for example Howe, 1986) point out, it is more accurate to talk of “socialisms” in the plural, given the different strands of theorizing and the different models of practice proposed that bear that descriptor. For example, Michael Newman’s (2005) (not the Australian adult educator) recent short introduction to the idea examines how it is interpreted in Cuban communism, Swedish social democracy, materialist feminism, and ecological socialism, among other movements. These multiple interpretations sometimes mean that a depressingly predictable feature of debate among left-leaning movements is acrimony regarding which particular group, organization, or tendency is the true guardian and correct interpreter of the flame. Monty Python’s Flying Circus hilariously parodied this in their comedy Life of Brian.

For us democratic socialism is a political and economic arrangement designed to answer one fundamental question: How best can we arrange society to foster compassion and enhance creativity? In our opinion such a society would be one in which, as much as it was humanly possible, fundamental survival needs (food, shelter, water, medical care) were met so that people’s energies could be directed away from basic survival toward the realization of creativity in the widest possible forms. This would require that the available physical and human resources be commonly owned and controlled—stewarded, used, and distributed for the good of all. A crucial feature is that this stewardship is “subjected to democratic control from below by the people and their communities” (Harrington, 1992, p. 9).

The point to common ownership, control, and stewardship would be to create the optimal conditions for different people to pursue their individual passions and widely varying enthusiasms with as much creativity as they could exercise. Work—productive labor—would be conceived primarily as an opportunity for people to exercise their creative powers. The purpose of work would be to ensure that commonly agreed upon basic needs were met and then to help people to realize their potential. In such a society no one would claim for themselves a right or privilege that was not available to all, and neither would it be possible to inherit power and privilege through the accident of one’s birth. It would therefore be impossible for a small minority to amass a disproportionate amount of wealth.

To bring about this kind of society—one that best fosters creativity and compassion—four conditions have to be in place. First, basic survival needs must be met. This means that construction, agriculture, public utilities, and health care will need to be commonly owned and controlled so that they can be coordinated to produce the goods and services sufficient to meet fundamental survival needs. Socialism is a social, political, and economic arrangement in which the resources available to all are shared equally, rather than being the property of sectional interests. Resources here include all the natural, physical, industrial, and cultural resources, and human properties, talents, and abilities available within a group. For us the exploitation and enjoyment of these resources is a matter for collective democratic deliberation, for a conversation that focuses on how these can best be stewarded for the common good. So socialism establishes some kind of common control over the economic system, so that whatever goods and services are produced are somehow controlled by the whole community or society. This requires some sort of coordinating agency or system of decision making—partly governmental, partly decentralized—to ensure this happens efficiently. Here is the link to participatory democracy through workers’ councils, town meetings, cyberspace communication, and so on.

Second, if people are to decide how best to meet their material needs, what kinds of work will produce what kinds of goods and services, or how to apportion the performance of necessary and unpleasant tasks so that one group or person is not unreasonably burdened with these, decision making mechanisms will need to be in place that everybody perceives as fair. Fairness is central to the socialist ideal. This does not mean, by the way, that the same mechanisms will be employed every time we make a decision. The principle underlying fairness in decision making is that those who are most directly affected by a decision should play the major part in making that decision. In these ways socialism is both the ultimate form of participatory democracy—such a long-lionized ideal within adult education—and a movement from an individualist, competitive ethic to a collective ethic that prevents any individual or group from claiming a disproportionate influence in social, economic, cultural, and political spheres of life. It is hard to imagine a better context for the use of the much-invoked concepts of “transformative learning” and “transformative practice” in adult education than in exploring how people learn to manage the transformation of an individualistic culture into the cooperative and collective ethic of socialism.

Fairness also does not mean that wages are equalized, that all small businesses are eliminated, or that creative entrepreneurship is discouraged. Wages will differ according to the kind of labor involved, its difficulty, the effort it requires, and its social necessity. So, workers whose labor guarantees basic needs—builders, sewage workers, health care providers, garbage collectors, farmers, and so on—will earn more than those who work to produce goods that make life pleasant, even if they are unnecessary to basic survival. Workers willing to undertake tasks that are necessary but unpleasant, and thus avoided by those with the means to do so, would receive higher remuneration. Small businesses that are owned and run cooperatively by individuals, and not large corporations run for the benefit of stockholders, would be actively encouraged.

Once survival needs are met, a third condition comes into play, creativity, the chief criterion we employ to decide how our time is best spent, how to organize education, and how work is to be remunerated. The more diverse are our work and educational practices, the more that social arrangements reflect the widest possible range of preferences, and the more that the people’s different passions and individual interests are encouraged, then the healthier a society will be. The point of common control of resources to meet basic survival needs is to free people to develop themselves to the fullest in whatever way they see fit, with the proviso that this must not diminish the development of others. So, unlike the stereotypical notion of socialism as bland conformity, a properly socialist system celebrates difference.

And, finally, a democratic socialist society is one in which difference, creativity, and diversity are matched by inclusion. Such a society recognizes that people differ firstly in talents, skills, interests, commitments, and physical capability. It further recognizes the importance of identity politics, that people differ by racial group membership, gender, ethnic affiliation, sexual orientation, and cultural tradition. But these differences are not matched by exclusion. A socialist democracy has no place for the “isms” and phobias that diminish us all—racism, classism, ableism, and homophobia. It honors difference and protects the rights of minorities from the potential tyranny of the majority. The minorities that are constrained are those that seek to accumulate a disproportionate amount of resources for their own exclusive use.

Each of these conditions of democratic socialism suggests any number of practices, and these practices in turn suggest various learning tasks. So the radical practice of adult learning comprises quite simply the learning required to enact these conditions of democratic socialism. Some of this learning will be self-directed, some collective; some will be formally structured, some more serendipitously accomplished; and some will be organized and run by credentialed teachers, some directed by peers, colleagues, and neighbors. In the next sections we explore in a more detailed way how the four conditions of socialism—meeting survival needs, fairness, creativity, and inclusion—each mandate a wide range of learning tasks.

MEETING SURVIVAL NEEDS

Survival needs are notoriously contextual. What one group or person in one place at one time considers necessary for survival differs enormously from how these needs are defined by other groups and individuals in other places and at other times. Given that the resources available to us are not infinite, there will have to be some kind of mechanism in place to judge (a) what comprises basic human needs, and (b) how these needs, once decided, can best be met given the resources available. This immediately suggests a number of learning tasks. People will have to learn about the range of judgments that exist in the society regarding how survival needs are defined, they will have to learn something about the resources available to all to address these needs, and they will have to learn to conceive and enact decision making mechanisms to meet those needs that are perceived as fair. At a very basic level, they will need to learn procedures to decide what needs should be met that allow everyone to feel their viewpoint has been represented in any decision made. We shall have more to say on this question of fairness in a few paragraphs.

For basic survival needs to be met there must be a way for societal resources to be stewarded and deployed in the interests of the majority. This aspect of democratic socialism—exerting common control over the stewardship and deployment of society’s resources—is probably the feature of socialism most commonly expressed in different versions of the idea. The principle of common ownership of the means of production and distribution; the idea that governments should nationalize all major industries and public utilities (health care, transportation, power supplies, telecommunications, education, and so on); the vision of a society based on locally controlled worker cooperatives or agrarian collectives; and the notion of a planned economy with a central agency directing what goods need to be produced and how these should be allocated across the community—all these are variations of the idea of common stewardship of resources for the benefit of all.

Effective majority stewardship mandates many learning tasks. First, we have to learn about different forms of needs assessment, so that decisions about production and deployment can be made that meet people’s real needs. Then we need to learn how to create mechanisms of communication—town meetings, factory councils, electronic voting—that allow full and free flow of information throughout society. This is a prerequisite for preventing ossification. Because people’s needs and interests constantly change, we must learn how to accommodate and respond to these changes of direction. Learning how to manage resources, how to set up systems of production, and how to match job requirements to the different interests and abilities of individuals are all required for the value of fairness to be realized.

Meeting survival needs also requires that people learn how to organize and administer mechanisms to produce and distribute the goods and services that are necessary to meet these needs. This is a massive educational project. It necessitates studying how communities and societies across history have tried to do this. It means studying how well the fledgling systems people establish to produce goods and services actually perform their task. On the basis of that study, people have to learn how to improve these systems of production and distribution. That, in turn, obviously requires preservice and in-service training to prepare people to run and work within these systems. On a more detailed level, it means a continuous program of research must be put in place that will allow these needs to be met more fully. A guiding principle of this research will be that discovering new resources and new ways to use them will be done with the intention of addressing the widest possible range of needs.

FAIRNESS

The success of any attempt to discover people’s basic survival needs, and then to organize production and distribution systems to meet these, will depend not so much on the internal logic of these systems but on whether or not they are perceived as fair. Any system that is perceived as disproportionately benefiting one group or individual will be actively sabotaged, or at best passively endured, by any groups that feel ignored. If a decision is to be perceived as fair, it will need to be trusted as having been reached only after the widest possible consultation and representation, and on the condition that in making that decision the fullest possible information has been taken into account. This is the essence of Habermas’ (1996) discourse theory of democracy, and it is why we regard socialism and democracy as intertwined.

As mentioned earlier, we don’t regard democracy as only one particular social arrangement; indeed, we believe democracy takes different forms in different situations and to accomplish different ends. The democratic value is one that holds that those affected by decisions are proportionally responsible for making those decisions. The more a practice or policy affects us, the greater should be our say in how that decision plays out. This is why a simple majority vote can be fundamentally unfair. After all, the votes of people far removed from my own problem or situation can always outvote me, even when the decision has no impact on their lives but a major one on mine. This means that decentralized forms of decision making are central to democratic socialism, which, in turn, means people need to be familiar with different kinds of decision-making mechanisms. So a central adult learning task becomes learning different decision-making mechanisms and learning how to judge which kinds of decision making are best suited to particular situations. From very local building, block, and neighborhood decisions to regional matters such as transportation or the location of health care facilities, to society-wide issues regarding educational provision or calculating what amounts of which products are necessary to meet people’s basic needs—all these decisions require that people be educated to have full information about the issues they have to decide on and that they learn how to participate fully in decision making.

As already stated, fairness for us means ensuring that no individual or group has greater power or influence over others in a way that is arbitrary. In line with our argument above, we acknowledge that in some situations it is only right that some have more influence over certain situations that others. Knowing about the connection between secondhand smoke inhalation and lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema, I should have a disproportionate amount of influence in requiring you not to smoke in my presence. What we want to avoid is the situation where an arbitrary indicator such as our skin color, social class membership, place of birth, gender, and so on unalterably determines what material benefits we will enjoy in life and gives us the chance to order others around.

Fairness also means that the resources of the planet—both natural and humanly created—be shared equally among its inhabitants. The present situation where certain countries and a small minority of individuals within those countries disproportionately enjoy massive amounts of wealth, and also direct how the majority of resources are to be deployed, is patently unfair. So for fairness to be an organizing value for society, we must institute the collective stewardship of resources already discussed.

DIFFERENCE AND CREATIVITY

From fairness comes our insistence on the recognition of difference. One of the most common and fundamental misunderstandings of fairness is that it imposes uniformity, disallowing individual identities and agendas. The opposite is the truth. Basic fairness recognizes that people are different; they have different talents, different personalities, different interests, and different enthusiasms. They also belong to different groups, and those groups constitute a major part of their identity. Some self-identify by racial group membership, others by sexual preference. Still more self-identify by ethnicity, by culture, by tribe, by commitment to a spiritual creed, or by their being raised in a distinctive town, region, or terrain. A principle of fairness is that one group cannot unduly influence another group to be remade in the first group’s image. Basic fairness insists that we recognize that people are different, both as individuals and as distinctive groups. And, recognizing this difference, fairness requires that ways be found to allow people to claim their identity in ways that are very distinct.

This commitment to recognizing difference in the interests of fairness mandates any number of learning tasks. Indeed, the contemporary emphasis on learning how to recognize and celebrate diversity of all kinds, how to communicate across racial and cultural difference, and on developing forms of antiracist practice can easily be understood as socialist forms of learning necessary to realize the principle of fairness. Fairness requires a good faith commitment of people of very different racial group memberships, ethnic affiliation, and cultural identity to learn to appreciate the different ways members of each group view the world and consider what counts as appropriate action. Fairness also entails learning to live with profound difference, so that the different needs and perceptions of groups can coexist in creative tension. Part of this is learning to be alert to the dangers of the tyranny of the majority. Finally, fairness means, at times, standing up to the agenda and power of a particular group that is attempting to undermine the development of a sense of collective identity or to promote hatred and bigotry. Fairness does not extend to groups who try to exercise their difference and creativity by diminishing the rights of others.

It is important to emphasize that acknowledging difference is not the same as a bland relativism that acknowledges every group’s agenda and every person’s viewpoint as being equally deserving of acknowledgment and as containing merit on its own terms. That kind of mushy refusal to take a stand plays into the interests of those in power, as Baptiste (2000) so cogently points out. In a society in which democratic socialism has been pilloried as conformist thought control that kills creativity, and in which even discussing a socialist alternative is portrayed as unpatriotic and un-American, anyone who attempts to get people to consider what a socialist economy and democracy looks like will have to fight against some very powerful interests. A skillful ideological manipulation has ensured that socialism is believed to be unworthy of serious attention and believed to be unworkable in the U.S. Allowing that view to go unchallenged—as representing the truth simply because it is expressed by a majority—means a socialist viewpoint will never stand a chance. Therefore, in the interests of fairness, it will be necessary to force people to pay attention to a socialist agenda. This is what Marcuse (1965) described as liberating tolerance.

We put difference and creativity together because for us the two are inseparable. The reason difference is so celebrated is because of its connection to creativity. The greater the difference we confront, the greater are the possibilities for creativity. Difference makes departures from the norm possible. It helps us envision alternative futures and confronts us with new forms of thinking and living. Difference helps us realize that what we thought was an unchangeable norm is always open to reinvention and re-creation in new ways. Difference encourages new approaches to artistic creation, but it also leads to unique syntheses being made and new connections being drawn. The point of meeting survival needs in a fair way is to create the conditions under which we can live the most unconstrained, free lives possible. Freed from the need to meet basic survival needs, people are able to develop their creative natures in whichever way they see fit.

INCLUSION