Adult and community education in complex societies: reconsidering critical perspectives

Abstract

In this contribution, I explore how critical pedagogical perspectives can inspire adult and community education practices. The central argument is that today, in contrast with the heydays of emancipatory practices and theories, the classical critical approaches need reconsideration. The paper explores how these approaches sometimes have a stultifying effect on the participants in practice. In line with the French philosopher Rancière, a perspective is explored that departs from emancipated participants rather than from participants in need of emancipation. The theoretical investigation is inspired by reflections on art practices that struggle with similar questions on emancipation as the field of adult and community education.That we live in complex societies today is the least one can say. Needless to say that, the current financial and economic crisis has dramatic consequences for many people living in the 'welfare societies'. Many countries still struggle to save their banking system and keep the state finances in balance. This happens often at the expense of the ordinary person in the street threatened with unemployment and income decrease, who has limited arms to resist to, what I consider, the pressures of the financial elites. In the beginning of the 1970s, there was still great optimism about how progress could be organized so as to achieve the reduction of poverty, to arrive at a fair redistribution of incomes and opportunities and to organize collective welfare in countries that were freeing themselves from dictatorial or colonizing regimes. This created a wave of optimism about the so-called 'manufacturability' of society, also in the fields of education, welfare and culture. Criticism and optimism were in the air, though we were then already approaching the end of the 'trente glorieuses' (the glorious thirty years), a period of unequalled economic growth and increased welfare for the common person and the elites in western societies.Tony Judt, in his inspiring book on the rise and fall of the welfare society (2010), describes how in the United States and in Europe, the period between Danny Wildemeersch is an emeritus professor of social and cultural pedagogy of the university of Leuven (Belgium).

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Unseen roots and unfolding flowers? Prison learning, equality and the education of socially excluded groups

“…This diverse grouping continues to address a similar concern, expressed through the idea that adult learning might encourage social responses to inequality and injustice whilst acknowledging the pivotal issue of who gets to speak and be heard on such matters (e.g. Gur-Ze'ev, 1998;Biesta, 2010;Wildemeersch, 2014;Galloway, 2017;Cowden & Ridley, 2019). This is equality understood as practice, enacted as a manifestation of hope and generosity, in the acknowledgement of inequality and injustice (Gur-Ze'ev, 1998; see Guillherme, 2019).…”

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