prepare a 3-5 page summary paper of the Lindeman textbook,The Meaning of Adult Education, which summarizes Dr. Lindeman’sdefinition and meaning of the concept of adult education and it’s benefits to the individual adult learner.
The Meaning of Adult Education Eduard C. Lindeman’s vision for education was not one bound by classrooms and formal curricula. It involved a concern for the educational possibilities of everyday life; non-vocational ideals; situations not subjects; and people’s experience – and it is worth quoting at some length from the opening chapter of the book. A fresh hope is astir. From many quarters comes the call to a new kind of education with its initial assumption affirming that education is life – not merely preparation for an unknown kind of future living. Consequently all static concepts of education which relegate the learning process to the period of youth are abandoned. The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings. This new venture is called adult education not because it is confined to adults but because adulthood, maturity, defines its limits… Secondly, education conceived as a process coterminous with life revolves about non-vocational ideals. In this world of specialists every one will of necessity learn to do his work, and if education of any variety can assist in this and in the further end of helping the worker to see the meaning of his labor, it will be education of a high order. But adult education more accurately defined begins where vocational education leaves off. Its purpose is to put meaning into the whole of life. Thirdly, the approach to adult education will be via the route of situations, not subjects. Our academic system has grown in reverse order; subjects and teachers constitute the starting-point, students are secondary. In conventional education the student is required to adjust himself to an established curriculum; in adult education the curriculum is built around the student’s needs and interests. Every adult person finds himself in specific situations with respect to his work, his recreation, his family-life, his community-life et cetera – situations which call for adjustments. Adult education begins at this point. Subject matter is brought into the situation, is put to work, when needed. Texts and teachers play a new and secondary rôle in this type of education; they must give way to the primary importance of the learner… The situation-approach to education means that the learning process is at the outset given a setting of reality. Intelligence performs its functions in relation to actualities, not abstractions. In the fourth place, the resource of highest value in adult education is the learner’s experience. If education is life, then life is also education. Too much of learning consists of vicarious substitution of some one else’s experience and knowledge. Psychology is teaching us, however, that we learn what we do, and that therefore all genuine education will keep doing and thinking together. Authoritative teaching, examinations which preclude original thinking, rigid pedagogical formulae – all of these have no place in adult education. ‘Friends educating each other’ says Yeaxlee, and perhaps Walt Whitman saw accurately with his fervent democratic vision what the new educational experiment implied when he wrote: ‘learn from the simple – teach the wise’. Small groups of aspiring adults who desire to keep their minds fresh and vigorous; who begin to learn by confronting pertinent situations; who dig down into the reservoirs of their experience before resorting to texts and secondary facts; who are led in the discussion by teachers who are also searchers after wisdom and not oracles: this constitutes the setting for adult education, the modern quest for life’s meaning. Lindeman 1926a: 4-7 Lindeman also added a strong commitment to progressive social action to these qualities. In a later article, he provides us with a compelling picture of a committed and action-oriented form of education. It: is not formal, not conventional, not designed merely for the purpose of cultivating skills, but… something which relates [people] definitely to their community… It has for one of its purposes the improvement of methods of social action… We are people who want change but we want it to be rational, understood. (Lindeman 1951b: 129-130) In Dewey’s (1916) terms this is education that enables people to share in a common life. It also looked for a critical understanding of experiences and situations. Eduard C. Lindeman saw the potential of collaborative and informal educational processes for people to question taken-for-granted ideas, beliefs, values and behaviours. Process and method. Eduard K. Lindeman wasn’t writing about these matters in abstraction. He had a concern for praxis. His early work looked to the process of youth organization and to group work. Such questions of process remained a concern of his in his writing. Working in small groups was central to his understanding of a worthwhile education – indeed it can be argued that the use of small group discussion was a central element in his characterization of the process of adult education. Lindeman was deeply critical of the extent to which a preoccupation with the content of education overbalanced pedagogical thought. Adult education happily requires neither entrance nor exit examinations. Adult learners attend classes voluntarily and they leave whenever the teaching falls below the standard of interest. What they learn converges upon life, not upon commencement and diploma. The external tokens of learning are removed so that the learning process may stand or fall on its intrinsic merits… And because adult education is free from the yoke of the subject-tradition, its builders can experiment boldly even in the sacrosanct sphere of the pedagogical method. Indeed, if adult education is to produce a difference of quality in the use of intelligence, its promoters will do well to devote their major concern to method and not content. (Lindeman 1926a: 114) The danger here is of overbalancing in the other direction – but Eduard C. Lindeman’s conclusion here can be understood within his overall concern with the development of critical and analytical thinking and action. ‘Education is a method’, he wrote, ‘for giving situations a setting, for analyzing complex wholes into manageable, understandable parts, and a method which points out the path of action which, if followed, will bring the circumstance within the area of experiment’ (Lindeman 1926a: 115). Curriculum. Thus far we have reviewed the assumptions that Lindeman saw as underpinning adult education, and the significance and distinctiveness of small group discussion in terms of its method. It is also necessary, when examining his contribution, to attend to what he had to say about the curriculum for adult education. Lindeman, as we have seen, was concerned about an over-focus on the subject within schooling and formal education. There are, however, particular themes that appeared in his work. He was concerned with cultivating individual freedom – but with due regard for the needs of others. ‘We live in freedom’, he wrote, ‘when we are conscious of a degree of self-direction proportionate to our capacities’ (Lindeman 1926a: 50). He also looked to the fostering of collective, democratic action, diversity and difference, and the educative potential of associational life. Adult education specifically aims to train individuals for a more fruitful participation in those smaller collective units which do so much to mold significant experience. (Lindeman 1926a: 38) Our personalities can be redeemed if we insist upon a proper share in the solution of problems which specifically concern us. This means giving more attention to small groups; it means as much decentralization, diversity and local autonomy as is consistent with order. Indeed, we may well sacrifice order, if enforced externally, for valid difference. Our hopes flow from the simple conviction that diversity is more likely to make life interesting than is conformity, and from the further conviction that active participation in interesting affairs furnishes proper stimulations for intellectual growth. (Lindeman 1926a: 89) Orthodox education may be a preparation for life but adult education is an agitating instrumentality for changing life. Institutions, groups and organizations come within the scope of continuing, advancing learning insofar as these collective agencies furnish the medium for educational experience. (Lindeman 1926a: 105) As Stephen Brookfield (1987: 22) has commented, time and again Lindeman argued that both through practical necessity and moral imperative, adult education was a social effort. It was central to the health and maintenance of democracy (Stewart 1987: 171). In conclusion Lindeman’s vision for adult education was sweeping and uplifting. He identified what he believed to be central assumptions. In doing this he was seeking to assert what he was later to describe as an ‘organic’ conception of adult education. He wanted to counter the ’mechanistic’ school (familiar to us today as the central and dominant paradigm in educational policy and practice). Essentially concerned with the extension and development of existing schooling forms for instrumental ends, such approaches were, in Lindeman’s view naïve, narrow and static (Brookfield 1987: 5). The emphasis on the exploration of situations and experience could have drawn straight out of Dewey (1910; 1916; 1925). The meaning of adult education THE MEANING OF ADULT EDUCATION E. C. Lindeman -Published on demand by UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS University Microfilms Limited, High Wycomb, England A Xerox Company, Ann A; bor, Michigan, U.S.A. ^ft&k^^&J&c^^^- iyw