Why Adults Learn

Towards a Theory of Participation in Adult Education

Sean Courtney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429788932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Originally published in 1992 this book looks at the phenomenon of adult education by exploring the nature of the motivation that moves people to return to school or to seek involvement inorganized learning activities. The book challenges the psychological emphasis of much research on adult learning. It concentrates on the concept of social participation and its implications for a reinterpretation of adult learning as an aspect of a person's involvement with his or her community or society.

1 Explaining participation in American adult education

Research on elementary and secondary education has largely ignored the topic [of participation] and in the higher education arena it has seldom been considered of major importance. Yet participation is central to theory and practice in adult education because the great majority of adults are voluntary learners.

(Darkenwald and Merriam, 1982)

Between work and sleep, labor and love, men and women carve out for themselves moments of leisure - discretionary slots - in which they engage in a variety of activities of greater or lesser meaning, more or less fulfillment. They participate in politics, join and become active in clubs, knock a ball around a field, or simply sit in the pleasant tribal gloom of the movie-house, eager for an hour or two to escape the human condition. They spend a third of their day, free enterprise notwithstanding, expending energy in the service of others. They may spend a third sleeping. Into the remaining third they cram all the rest: love-making, eating, visiting friends, watching television, pounding on a hobby in the basement, walking for health, helping elect reactionary politicians, writing letters, and so on.

Among this motley collection falls an activity which seems at times to belong more to the realm of labor than of leisure, of work than of play. Often thought of as an activity in its own right, it may also appear as a perspective on some other activity, a ghost of purpose hovering about that which is being pursued for its own ends. For the most part, however, in an age with its penchant for the visible, it is something which has been detached from the flux and thrust into a realm of its own, with a sign hung over its head and a label on its chest. It is adult education. And it reflects the behavior of millions of men and women on the American continent busy in the business of life, now laboring, now loving, and, in between bites, now learning.

In 1989, approximately 25 million Americans will have taken part in some form of organized learning activity.¹ This constitutes about 14 per cent of the total adult population of the country. In 1984, the last year for which we have up-to-date figures, the figure was 23 million. By 1990, other things being equal, the percentage will increase slightly to 15 per cent While these numbers suggest a leveling off in the total participant population since the beginning of the 1980s, they remain impressive by any measure. Moreover, this species of voluntary, social action appears to have dramatically increased in recent years. Between 1969 and 1984, the overall adult population, meaning those aged 17 and over, increased by about 27 per cent. The proportion of those participating in adult education, however, increased by 63 per cent, more than twice the rate for the adult population as a whole. That is indeed impressive. It means that for millions of American men and women, deliberate and planned learning is a significant factor in their lives.

And this may not be the whole story. Some independent surveys have put the real number of adult learners as high as 35 per cent (Carp, Petersen and Roelfs, 1974) or even 50 per cent (Aslanian and Brickell, 1980) of the adult population, while there are some researchers, following the line of inquiry initiated by Allen Tough, who have pegged the number even higher. For example, a national survey conducted by Patrick Penland in the mid-1970s estimated that

about 80 per cent of the American population 18 years and older perceive themselves to be continuing learners,... [while] over 3/4 of the U.S. population ... had planned one or more learning projects on their own in the year before ... the data were collected. (Penland, 1979, p. 173)

Whether attending classes in schools and community colleges, sending away for correspondence packages, or doing on-the-job training, Americans are engaging in behaviors many of which are universal in nature; others are quintessentially their own. They are attempting to learn a language with headphones and a cassette, how to repair a car armed with ‘power’ tools and the latest five-hundred-page manual. A man about to retire is reading all he can on the subject ‘Is there life after work?’ A woman returns to college to earn a degree now that her children are all grown up and moved away. From birthing to ‘deathing,’ in the popular and scientific literature, this unending variety of classes, encounter groups, and self-directed, self-improvement projects constitutes the phenomenon of mass, adult education, perhaps one of the most popular forms of recreation on the North American continent. What was once the domain of the few today constitutes, or so it seems, a genuine ‘Learning Society.’²

There can be no doubting a new awareness about the nature and pervasiveness of adult education in American society. While traditionally, education has been identified with schooling and with all that takes place roughly between the ages of 5 and 20, there is now a growing sense that schooling, even where successful, is but half of the total picture and that learning itself is a much more varied, boundary-crossing, unplanned, spontaneous, problem-specific, need-driven phenomenon than was formerly thought.³

The purpose of this book is to construct an explanation of why this is happening. Why do adults continue to learn after they have escaped the chalky ennui of the classroom? What motivates them to return? What are their goals and how do they achieve them? Why do some seem such eager learners while others, who are similar to them in many ways, seem not to care? What, more generally, accounts for the variety of educational opportunity in the United States? Why do adults learn?

THE PROBLEM OF PARTICIPATION

For most of us, whether administrators of programs, teachers of adults, or program planners, these questions and the possible answers they generate seem relatively straightforward and uncomplicated. Survey research has provided the following list. There is the need to acquire basic information and apply it in one’s daily life, the desire to advance professionally, or the need to increase efficiency at work. People learn for cultural enjoyment, to become more useful in the community, because friends or family urge one to get involved, out of boredom and the desire for the company of like-minded people, because they like a particular subject matter or enjoy a particular hobby, and so forth. To change, to gain confidence, to meet everyday challenges - these and many more litter the stage on which the question of motivation is raised.

In our everyday lives we witness the vitality of people in the pursuit of knowledge and greater skills. We encounter many who find it natural to continue the life of learning from school into adulthood. We encounter many others who were not motivated by school, but who decide to return to the scene of earlier disappointments only because they have been persuaded that without it, without a ‘sheepskin,’ survival in today’s advanced ‘post-industrial’ age will be difficult. For we have been told by politicians and religious leaders that change is the order of the day and that further education is needed to cope with, understand and indeed embrace change. We have the witness of our own eyes and ears when we read of the inexorable demise of the great dinosaurs which once made America great: the steel foundries of US Steel and Republic lying dead along the shores of South Chicago and the Monongahela River in Ohio. Only retraining can help the unemployed of these companies to go forward into the next age. Even without the competition from Japan and South Korea, the accelerated march of technology is creating new jobs, at the same time rendering whole occupational categories obsolete. So the need is there, apparently, and the opportunities also, apparently, are there: plenty of community colleges, classes run by schools and universities, programs for retraining skilled manual workers at one end of the status continuum, and programs of continuing professional education to update current skills and knowledge at the other end.

Two assumptions underlie this somewhat idealized scenario. According to the first, those responsible for organizing educational opportunities for adults will assume that wherever educational needs exist they are being fulfilled or shortly will be. According to the second, there is a fairly direct line from the ‘felt’ need to its fulfillment, from the person’s believing he or she ought to learn more to his or her actually engaging in various types of goal-related activities. Both assumptions may be wrong, and it is the way in which they may be wrong that gives this study its rationale.

Adult education as a response to personal and social needs

Since researchers first began to survey the phenomenon of participation in adult education (PAE) back in the late 1920s (Marsh, 1926; Lorimer, 1931), they have been uncovering basically the same findings time and time again. Despite the apparent need, in the quick-silver environment of job change and obsolescence, for new skills and new knowledge and despite the apparent willingness of American postsecondary institutions to respond to this apparent demand, there are fewer participants than nonparticipants in organized learning programs, fewer learners, apparently, than non-learners. Moreover, those who do participate are in precise ways distinct from those who do not.

Organized adult education in the United States is essentially the social domain of white, middle-class American men and women who are relatively well-educated and young. What was true over twenty years ago when Johnstone and Rivera (196S) constructed their now famous and much-quoted profile of the ‘average’ participant, and what was certainly true before that time, remains the case today:

The participant is just as often a woman as a man, is typically under 40, has completed high school or better, enjoys an above-average income, works full-time and in a white-collar occupation, is white, Protestant, married and has children, lives in an urbanized area (more likely the suburbs than the city), and is found in all parts of the country, but more frequently on the West coast than would be expected by chance. (Johnstone and Rivera, 1965, p. 78)

Those who have not completed high school and those who occupy manual, blue-collar occupations are far less likely to be represented among the ranks of the educationally participating. It is a phenomenon whose socioeconomic structure has hardly altered since the first systematic surveys documented the relationship in the late 1920s. It is a profile that was in place before Johnstone and Rivera and, with few exceptions, runs counter to the egalitarian, compensatory and social reformist ethos which has permeated the rhetoric if not the practice of American adult education since the early decades of this century.⁴ Indeed, it may well be the case that as the gap between classes in the United States is perceived to widen, adult education may be contributing to the process by widening it further:

One out of 25 adults who did not graduate from high school seeks further education, for those who graduated... the proportion is three out of 25; for those with some postsecondary education, the proportion rises to 5 out of 25; and for college graduates, it peaks at 8 out of 25. (Arbeiter, 1977, p. 4; quoting Kimmel, 1976)

The Chronicle of Higher Education (1/11/84), reporting on a survey of community colleges by the California Postsecondary Education Commission, noted that ‘The typical student in the... community college system is a middle-class white woman seeking to update job skills or pursue personal interests, not a low-income student from a minority group’, as was supposed to be the case.

Organized adult education, especially that which is sponsored by our schools, colleges and universities, does not appear to be reaching those sectors of the population that would appear to need it most. And the inequalities to be found at the primary and secondary school levels -inequalities which are perpetuated in higher education and which favor some ethnic groups and social classes over others - appear to be repeated and possibly exaggerated by the normal forms of adult and postsecondary education.

While there is then a perception shared by both the public and those who provide and teach educational programs that opportunities for learning in adulthood are open to all, reflecting a true market economy, the reality appears to be otherwise. Adult education is not the open supermarket into which all by virtue of their purchasing power can enter and buy at will. At times it appears more to resemble a club, of moderate to high exclusivity, whose entrance is on Main Street and thus visible to all, whose doors revolve for anyone to enter, but whose rules confront everyone once inside, beckoning some to advance further while rejecting many more as unworthy.

Motivation-to-learn and involvement with formal education

In 1979, Anderson and Darkenwald, two researchers with the College Entrance Examination Board, published a report in which they analyzed survey data gathered by the National Center for Educational Statistics (Washington, DC), and published as part of its triennial series on PAE. The purpose of the College Board study was to tackle questions which had been raised and discussed before. What factors distinguished between those who became involved with adult education and those who did not? What factors were associated with persistence in and drop-out from programs of organized instruction for adults?

Their findings, with one exception, were not unexpected. As in previous studies of this kind, ‘the most powerful predictor of participation in adult education is amount of formal schooling’ (Anderson and Darkenwald, 1979, p. 3), meaning that those who become involved with formal learning as adults tend to have a much higher level of education than those who do not. Similarly, and in line with previous research, they found a high correlation between age and participation: the older the individual the less likely he or she is to engage in formal learning activities.

Together, both variables accounted for the greatest amounts of statistical variance. In other words, of all the potentially relevant variables, age and formal schooling together were the most likely causes of participation and persistence in adult education. It is the exceptional finding, however, which catches our attention:

Despite a very large and representative sample (n=79,631) and data on a very large number of seemingly important variables, only 10 per cent of the variance associated with participation and persistence could be accounted for statistically. In other words, 90 per cent of whatever it is that leads adults to participate in and drop out from adult education has not been identified by this or by other similar studies conducted in the past. (Anderson and Darkenwald, 1979, p. 5, emphasis added)⁵

Translated, these findings seem to confirm what many researchers had long suspected. Demographic or sociological variables, while important in the overall picture, are not the real causes of PAE. They are a ‘front’ for something else; they ‘mediate’ the significant variables. In other words, when comparing two adults who may be similar in many other ways, researchers cannot say definitively just what it is that makes one more interested in education than another and, even when both have similar orientations to learning, what makes one person more likely to participate in organized learning activities than the other.

For those researchers who have cut their teeth on this problem the Anderson and Darkenwald conclusion was as inevitable as it was disappointing. In their eyes, it pointed to the extreme limitations of the ‘descriptive’ approach to the problem: the conducting of surveys on relevant populations without the benefit of theories or hypotheses. This, too, was the perspective taken by Anderson and Darkenwald. They concluded by calling for a more consistently theoretical approach to the problem, arguing that descriptive research like theirs had outlived its usefulness.

This criticism was not new. Nearly thirty years ago, it was remarked that ‘[in] spite of the growing body of empirical studies, the research reports present only a fragmentary and unintegrated picture of participation in adult education programs’ (Knox and Videbeck, 1963, p. 102). The same view was uttered some fifteen years later: ‘One feature common to most of the information being collected about the characteristics of adult participation is that it is almost exclusively descriptive’ (Grotelueschen and Caulley, 1977, p. 22). While these authors praised the usefulness of the ‘descriptive’ study or survey, others were less kind: ‘The absence of testable theory has crippled adult education participation and dropout research for decades’ (Boshier, 1973, p. 255). Nor, it seemed, had the problem disappeared with the passing of time, the dramatic growth of graduate programs, and a concomitant growth in more theoretically oriented research, as evidenced, for example, by the various content analyses of the journal, Adult Education, now Adult Education Quarterly.⁶

One of the most underutilized vehicles for understanding various aspects of adult learning is theory. The notable lack of theory ... has led to some harsh words by some of its best friends. Boshier... goes so far as to call adult education a ‘conceptual desert,’ and Mezirow... complains that the absence of theory is a ‘pervasively debilitating influence’ in adult education. Unfortunately they are correct in their judgement that theory is almost nonexistent. (Cross, 1981, p. 109)

The picture then presented here is of a field of research which...