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Can post-modern adults be educated?
Christopher Wiltsher, University of Sheffield
Introduction
The title of this conference ‘Diversity and development: futures in the education of adults’ suggests that the education of adults will continue in the future. Working in a university department of adult continuing education, one might take a gloomier view, for there seems to be a growing number of serious challenges to the very existence of adult continuing education as we have known it.
Some of the challenges arise through policy decisions on matters of accreditation, finance, quality, delivery and so on. Other challenges appear more abstract, but are nevertheless potentially just as destructive, and threaten to undermine the whole enterprise of higher education, not just adult continuing education. These arise from the intellectual movement known loosely as post-modernism.
We shall look more closely later at the content of post-modernism. Here we need note only that the movement raises serious questions for any activity concerned with the acquisition or transmission of knowledge, however defined. Current views of higher education, including adult education at this level, incorporate assumptions about the acquisition and transmission of knowledge. These views are therefore open to post-modernist criticism, and are made more vulnerable to that criticism by the lack of a philosophically grounded clarification and justification of the theory and practice of higher education and of adult continuing education in the university setting.
But the concern does not stop there. Students on adult education courses in the future will have grown up and received their initial education in a culture affected by post-modernist views. Those preparing and delivering courses will have to take this into account. At the same time, there is a strong suspicion that university adult education courses will soon be required to justify themselves in terms of the number of credits achieved by students. Quite properly, both the syllabus and the assessment for an accredited course require the approval of institutional as well as departmental colleagues, just like any other course carrying credit awarded by the university. However the processes of academic approval can place severe constraints on the ability of departments of adult continuing education to respond appropriately to their students, not least because colleagues in other departments do not always recognise the particular needs, interests and prior knowledge and experience of adult students. If those adult students have developed in a post-modern intellectual climate, the clash between their approach to education and that of many university colleagues will pose, I suggest, even greater problems for those involved in developing courses in adult continuing education.
This paper is concerned then with adult continuing education in the university and with post-modernism: that is, it is concerned with two sets of ideas which are very hard to pin down. In neither case is there a consensus in current literature about what these umbrella terms cover, which allows plenty of room for manoeuvre to advocates and critics alike. One could spend a whole session examining the different possibilities and combinations of definitions and their implications in the two areas. To avoid the temptations of conceptual trivial pursuit, I shall indicate what, for the purposes of this paper, I take to be the most significant ideas from the two areas of education and post-modernism. I shall then examine these strands in relation to each other, hoping that in so doing I am not simply setting up straw dummies.
Education
We begin with the idea of education. There has been much debate about the concept of education, and many definitions of education are available in the current literature. For our concern with education at the university level, a sufficient basis is provided by Ronald Barnett’s discussion of the idea of higher education[1]. Concluding his analysis, Barnett suggests six conditions which together would constitute processes of higher education. These include the understanding and critique of certain knowledge claims and the development in the student of ‘the capacity critically to evaluate his or her own achievements, knowledge claims and performance’[2].
In discussing knowledge Barnett is at pains to stress the complexity of knowledge claims. Nevertheless he wishes to make a distinction between bona fide knowledge and spurious knowledge. To do this he uses the ideas of objectivity and truth, claiming that ‘ higher education is founded on the beliefs that objectivity and truth are attainable’[3]. In Barnett’s analysis, objectivity is retained but allied to a form of subjectivity through paying attention to students’ personal responses to situations, while truth is seen as in part negotiable, developed through open and critical conversation which carries in-built ethical demands[4].
This emphasis on student responses links with many definitions current in the field of adult education. Typical is that of Peter Jarvis[5]. He defines education as ‘any planned series of incidents, having a humanistic basis, directed towards the participants learning and understanding’[6]. Learning is ‘the process of transforming experience into knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, etc.’[7].
It is not appropriate here to discuss these analyses. What we need to notice is the underlying ideas of knowledge and of people. Knowledge is seen as at least in part objective, accessed by rational thought and subject to universal criteria of judgement. People, the participants in the educational process, are seen as self-reflective entities, capable of learning and understanding and transforming their own experience. These underlying ideas are challenged by post-modernist thought.
Post-modernism
Characterising post-modernism is difficult because the term is used very loosely and covers a wide variety of stances and ideas in a range of disciplines. However, for our present purposes, the most significant strands of post-modernist thought occur in philosophy and here we can discern some continuity across a variety of philosophical positions. Amongst the common strands of philosophical post-modernism, three in particular question the possibility of the kind of higher education of adults described above. These are the claims that human thinking is fragmented and locally determined, that knowledge cannot be objective and that the self is a construct mediated through discourse.
The first claim denies the possibility of any universally or timelessly valid categories or rules of thought. Instead, it is said, rational thought always takes place within a particular setting and so is always conditioned by time and place and culture. This applies to the rules of thought as much as to the content. Consequently our thinking is determined and circumscribed by the local conditions in which we find ourselves, and is necessarily fragmented because the conditions are constantly changing.
The second claim, that knowledge cannot be objective, denies all attempts to ground knowledge claims in some transcendent reality. All knowledge, it is said, is socially constructed and relative to a particular knower in a particular culture at a particular time. Hence there is no vantage point from which knowledge can be discussed disinterestedly, or to which the seeker after knowledge can be drawn. Instead, all prospective knowers must start from where they are, and get where they can by integrating within themselves the various discourses of which they are part.
The third claim relates the discourses of which we are part to ourselves. For post-modern thought there is no such thing as the essential self, an autonomous being which in some way precedes our experience. Instead we are constituted and mediated through taking part in a variety of formative processes, which together provide us with our sense of who and what we are at a given point in time.
If these brief summaries are accurate, then the effect of philosophical post-modernism is to deny precisely those ideas of knowledge and of people which undergird the views of higher education outlined earlier. In order to appreciate the implications of such a denial, we shall consider its effect on the course, the tutor and the student in university adult continuing education.
University adult education and post-modernism
In a post-modernist world, courses cannot offer knowledge within a discipline governed by universal rules of intellectual discourse, for there is no objective knowledge and there are no absolute rules of thought. If there is no objective knowledge, higher education as described by Barnett cannot take place. Even given his development in terms of conversation and truth by negotiation, there is still an assumption that in higher education there is something to be taught and some way of assessing what is taught in order to distinguish the spurious from the good. Any such assessment requires a standpoint outside the subject concerned. On a post-modern view, that is not possible.
Moreover, the post-modernist perspective attacks the division of subject matter by disciplines. There are no absolute or universal boundaries, and necessarily we constitute our own realms of discourse. Consequently, our cherished traditional specialisms become redundant. Of course, many tutors in adult education habitually and happily cross traditional academic disciplinary boundaries, but for higher education the total demise of subject disciplines is a problem, for both tutor and student.
Higher education assumes that teaching is done by specialists, usually engaged in research which means they are working at the leading edge of knowledge in their field. To be classified in this way puts the tutor in the position of one who knows something: indeed for many students in adult education, the reason for coming to a class in the first place is that they wish to hear about a particular topic from someone who knows something, who is an expert in the field. Granted that the best adult education practice expects the tutor to be a learner also and to engage with the students and draw on and incorporate their individual expertise, experience and knowledge into the group experience, it is still the case that someone has to draft the syllabus, direct the process and keep the discussion on track. According to post-modernism, there is no standpoint from which you can do that: the tutor is not only a learner, but a learner with no greater pretensions to knowledge than the students.
And what of the students, engaged in their directed process of learning and understanding? They are being formed in post-modern fashion by the discourses of which they are part. They are not autonomous rational selves but creatures of process, involved in the continuous integration of new experiences. Can they ever achieve understanding? Apparently not, at least if understanding is taken to include some clear grasp of knowledge on which to build, for all knowledge and all understanding is relative, culturally conditioned and largely superficial!
Thus it seems that higher education as traditionally conceived, even in the modified form presented by Barnett, cannot take place in a post-modern world, and post-modern adults cannot be educated at university level in any traditional sense of education. There is nothing to teach, nobody able to teach the nothing and no one able to learn from the nobodies teaching nothing.
Educating post-modern adults
What is to be done then? Should all of us in university departments of adult continuing education pack up and steal quietly away even before the administration catches up with us? I am more hopeful than that, partly because in outlining the challenge of post-modernism we have already mentioned some of the things which point towards the continuation of continuing education.
In the post-modern world we have lost objective knowledge, but we have gained support for the idea of a community of knowledge in which all are ready to be open and to learn from each other. What is offered in a course will be explicitly a series of perspectives on information drawn from a variety of sources including the students’ experience. The open syllabus shaped by the interests of tutor and students together, often claimed to be a feature of the best liberal adult education of the past, will become a necessary element. We shall need to develop a fresh understanding of the transferrable skills which presently unite academic disciplines, including the skills of analysis and critical reflection, but that too has been part of the adult education scene for some time. In all this, the experience and practice of adult education can serve as a model for colleagues used to a more restricted idea of syllabus and skill.
Then if we have lost the post-modern teacher we have gained fresh backing for the idea of the teacher as learner and the traditional extra-mural learning contract. Post-modern students must be taken seriously as adults, as people able to bring both experience and reflective ability to their studies, and the post-modern tutor must accept the limitations of personal expertise. This will require a change of attitude for many tutors and students, but offers the possibility of actually realising the ideals of the extra-mural tradition.
The post-modern student may not be an autonomous rational being, but will certainly be ready to develop a critical stance on everything. This may be uncomfortable at times, but it will be good for everyone. Further, while the icon of a completed, formed, integrated educational success has been destroyed in the post-modern world, we have gained a sense of openness and progress. Students will all know that they are on the way, always. On the way to what? To further experience, further development, further efforts at integration: we really are concerned with lifelong learning.
However, if all these positive developments in adult continuing education are to be accepted by university colleagues as proper higher education, we shall need to change the received view of higher education. Wilfred Carr has attempted to point the way to do this for education generally[8] through the idea of emancipatory education. Using his terms, higher education will need to become not only emancipatory, but emanicipatory through the specific development of a critical consciousness.
So can post-modern adults be educated at university level? I believe that they can. It seems to me that the post-modern challenge as I have described it can be met effectively, if we are prepared to examine and amend the basis of our theory and practice.
One final word. I have not yet met any post-modern adults, and I do not expect to do so. Post-modernism seems to me to be an intellectual game, which in the end has no substance and which will pass away sooner rather than later. Nevertheless those who call themselves post-modernist raise important issues which should be addressed, in education as much as elsewhere. In criticising received ideas, post-modernism is offering us insights, some of which, I have suggested, will help to legitimate and extend practices which adult educators have recognised as good practice for a long time. A positive response to those insights will help not only the cause of adult education, but also the cause of higher education. So even if post-modern adults cannot be educated in the traditional sense, the adults of our present and future worlds can, and will, be educated.
[1] Barnett, R (1990) The idea of higher education. Buckingham, SRHE and Open University Press.
[2] ibid p. 203
[3] ib