Histories of adult education

Abstract

As I write this introduction in March 2003, on the eve of the Third Gulf War, the old saw is very much in my mind: ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes'. The three contributors to this chapter endorse this sentiment. Mike Welton begins the chapter by exploring the connections between history and myth. He reminds us that historians must be critical of their own assumptions. He then acts on this by critically examining the central emancipator story of Canadian adult education, the Antigonish movement, of which he is a major historian. Welton argues that adult educators have invested Antigonish with too much emancipatory hope, and have turned it into a disabling myth. He concludes by urging adult educators to keep hoping, and working, for a better world, but to 'dream closer to the ground' .He calls for 'much deeper reflection on the historical forces that subvert the attempts of ordinary people to realise their potential’. In the second contribution, Bob Boughton also calls for a more critical approach to adult education history. He argues that in Australia and elsewhere a liberal history of adult education has dominated, one that sees adult education evolving towards today's 'highly professionalized and depoliticised field of practice' . Boughton shows how this liberal story has repressed other histories of adult education and learning. He outlines a further Australian adult education history-a workers' history-and refers to two others: an indigenous history and a women's history. In doing this he shows that the repression of these popular adult education histories has divided and undermined popular movements by preventing them from learning from their experience. He concludes by calling for the development of 'learning movements', 'which study and learn about the world as they work to change it'. Lucy Taksa's contribution reconstructs a particular 'lost history', the struggle over the direction of adult education in New South Wales, Australia, between the two world wars of the 20th century. Taksa traces the transplanting of the British Workers' Educational Association to Australia. She argues that the WEA, dominated by 'middle class liberals, saw education as the means for achieving individual improvement and social peace'. But this desire challenged the labour movement's demand for more radical and emancipatory social change. So Australian workers turned away from the WEA and established their own formal and informal educational structures. While these were often short-lived, they provided an independent working-class education aimed at achieving, as a union educator put it in 1924, 'a revolutionary change in existing economic and social institutions and conditions'.