Adult Education: Social Change or Status Quo? :: Argumentative Pesuasive Papers

Adult Education Social Change or Status Quo?Some believe that adult nurture was focused on a mission of societal change in its formative geezerhood as a field in the 1920s. As it evolved and became institutionalized, the field became control with professionalization. More recently, emphasis on literacy and lifelong learning in a changing workplace has allied it with the agenda of economic competitiveness. This Digest examines the knock over over the mission of adult education is it to transform persons or ordination? It looks at whether adult education functions as a means of mandate in a democratic society or as an cats-paw for maintaining the status quo. Individual or Society? One of the core tensions of adult education (Merriam and Brockett 1997) is whether the primary focus of the field should be on someones or society. Beatty (1992) is unequivocal in her stance The individual and change within the individual are not only the necessary and sufficient beginning and ter minate transmits for all adult education but also the focal point for the educational undertaking (p. 17). She argues that the individual-society dichotomy is false educated, empowered individuals create neighborly change in ever-increasing spheres. Hass (1992) agrees that social change is brought about by the individuals affected. Mezirows transformative surmise suggests that individual perspective switch must precede social transformation (Merriam and Brockett 1997). In describing the ideas of Lindeman, Heaney (1996) and Wilson (1992) point out the complexity of the relationship between individuals and society. For Lindeman, individual growth and development take place within the social context, and changed individuals pull up stakes have the collective effect of changing society. But Wilson states that it is unclear provided how the social order is thereby changed. Others suggest that groups and communities, not individuals, create social change (Horton 1989), that personal autonomy can be achieved only through collective action (Welton 1993), and that the to the full developed individual is the consummation of the fully developed society. Ilsley (1992) argues that, although equality in the United States has been defined in cost of individual opportunity, liberty and justice do not arise from individualism. engraft in this argument is another debate over whether adult education actually did set out with a social purpose that has been lost. A strong practice of adult education for social change is unembellished in the work of Paulo Freire in Latin America and Myles Horton at the alpestrine Folk School. Their influence continues, although well on the margins of the adult education mainstream (Heaney 1996, p.