8411
Training educators of adults: a comparative analysis of graduate adult education in the United States and Great Britain[1]
Stephen Brookfield, Teachers College, Columbia University
Abstract
The habit of viewing adult education curricula and practices as reflective of wider social structures and prevailing political ideologies seems unfamiliar to adult educators. There are few adult education equivalents to the critical analyses of school curricula undertaken by Young, Bourdieu and Passerson, and Bowles and Gintis, all of whom investigate the manner in which school curricula perpetuate and sustain existing world views, stereotypes, societal values, political ideologies and behavioural norms. To these writers school curricula are social facts; sui generis realities which can be studied as objective phenomena in the same way as we study economic arrangements or political systems.
In this paper a similar interpretative framework is employed in analysing programs of graduate adult education offered in universities in the United States and Britain. The paper reviews theoretical literature, textbooks of professional preparation, and accounts of graduate training in the two societies. Based on this review, the author argues that we should regard the methods, curricula, modes of evaluation and intellectual terrain of graduate adult education as socio-cultural products. Hence, these practices and intellectual orientations should be examined within their cultural context for us to understand them fully. Graduate adult education programs are not specific, isolated and idiosyncratic activities; rather, they reflect prevailing cultural forms and political ideologies in their manner of organisation and their intellectual orientations.
Six analytical categories are employed in this cross-cultural analysis. Graduate adult education programs in the two countries are analysed in terms of (1) their historicity, (2) their political context, (3) their philosophical orientation, (4) their specification of the competencies required of professional adult educators, (5) the concept of adult education informing these programs of professional preparation and development, and (6) their contrasting paradigms of appropriate research.
The paper discusses the intellectual history of adult education in the two societies and the scale of the graduate adult education enterprise, before highlighting specific differences in terms of the six analytical categories identified. The author contends that American graduate adult education is framed within a consensus, a-philosophical and a-historical setting. A professional adult educator is seen as one possessing a range of programmatic, administrative and instructional techniques. In Britain, however, a professional is seen as one who has been exposed to a vigorous debate concerning the philosophical purposes of adult education, and who can set adult education practice within some broader historical and political context. Courses, assignments, dissertations and published work within graduate programmes in the two countries are cited as evidence of these fundamental differences.
[1] This paper was published in the International Journal of Lifelong Education, vol. 4, no. 4, 1985, pp. 2