The Sociology of Adult & Continuing Education

Peter Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415684859
• eBook ISBN: 9781136628702
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides a comprehensive sociological overview of adult and continuing education. It draws on all branches of sociology rather than advocating one approach. It examines the theories of all the significant sociological writers in the field such as Knowles, Marx, Freire and Gramsci and sets them in the broader intellectual context. It also considers the content of the curriculum in adult education and the place of adult education in society at large. The author indicates the strengths and weaknesses of the different sociological perspectives and demonstrates how they can be used to analyse the function and purpose of adult and continuing education.

Part I

Sociological Perspectives

Chapter one

Sociological Introduction

The education of adults is no new phenomenon: it has existed for centuries in one form or another. The Greeks separated education from training and trained their children for their place in the wider society but enabled their adults, who were leisured enough, to be educated. Hence, the education of adults was not new in that society and education itself was a phenomenon that would have been open to the considerations of the social analyst. Indeed, there is a sense in which Plato actually performed that, function, although obviously his analysis formed the basis of the philosophy of education rather than a sociology of education. Many centuries were to elapse before that was to appear. However, over that period the education of adults has continued and as more studies in this discipline appeared they have been embedded in psychology, in adult learning and in designing programmes for adult learners. Clearly there are many reasons why emphasis has been placed upon these areas, such as the fact that it had traditionally been assumed that intelligence declined in adulthood. Hence myths of this nature had to be laid to rest.

More recently, it has been recognised that the education of adults might be an instrument in social change; Gramsci (see Entwistle 1979), for instance, thought that worker education could help destroy the cultural hegemony of the dominant social classes in Italy and, since the Second World War, the education of adults has been viewed as an instrument for the development of Third World countries, by organizations such as UNESCO. Additionally, it has been recognised that adult education serves other functions in society, such as a leisure function (Parker 1976).

Despite its long history, no sociology of the education of adults exists in the same manner as there are sociological studies of initial education. Indeed, throughout this study recourse will be made to some of the insights in these analyses and their findings will be examined in the context of the education of adults. Thompson’s (1980) symposium was one of the first attempts to produce a genuine sociological analysis of adult education but for a variety of reasons it was not received with tremendous enthusiasm by adult educators in the United Kingdom. Reviewers (Legge 1980, Stock 1981), while welcoming it, were critical for a variety of reasons including the fact that many of its contributors were university academics, it had a limited perception of adult education and the papers were of variable quality. However, one other major reason exists and this may be because it adopted a critical sociological perspective with a radical ideological approach. By contrast, Cunningham (1983:257) in America welcomed it as a ‘breath of fresh air’. She was also aware of the book’s deficiencies which exhibited no suspicion about the writers nor their perspectives.

Since the publication of that symposium there has been no systematic attempt to analyse the education of adults from the perspective of the social theorist, although there have been a number of studies published, some of which continues the debate that Thompson’s book started. Thomas (1982), for instance, examines radical adult educators and shows the strategies that have been adopted to ensure that their ideas have not found wider audiences than they have. Since he is also interested in comparative adult education he has included in his study reference to what he regards as an institutionalised form of radical adult education, the Danish Folk High School, but in this sense Thomas ceased to deal with a politically radical form of education, so that while his study adds to the sociological literature it does not fall into the category of a systematic sociological analysis of the education of adults. Indeed, that was not the author’s intention. Consequently, a gap still exists in the literature about adult and continuing education and the intention of this present study is to attempt to fill the void.

One of the reasons why no study of the education of adults has been undertaken from this perspective is the difficulty in deciding precisely what is the phenomenon under consideration.

McCullough (1980:158) nicely summarises this problem:

Extracting adult education from its surrounding social milieu – or at least differentiating adult education from its social milieu – is as difficult as a determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Is adult education a practice or a program? A methodology or an organization? A “science ” or a system? A process or a profession? Is adult education different from continuing education, vocational education, higher education? Does adult education have form and substance, or does it merely permeate the environment like air? Is adult education, therefore, everywhere yet nowhere in particular? Does adult education even exist?

He concludes in the affirmative in response to this last question but many of the others remain unanswered. However, two things he (1980:159) is sure about, that adult education has an ‘organization and a purpose that can be structurally analyzed’. However, these conclusions and the questions raised in the long quotation merely reflect the complex issues that Peters and his associates (1980) were grappling with in this American study of adult education. The various contributors to this study clearly differed in their views about whether their lack of coherent structure was a good or a bad thing for adult education: Knowles (1980a:39) appears to consider that it gives flexibility to it to respond to whatever social needs arose while Griffith (1980:74) considers that this is a weakness because it inhibits planned co-ordination. However, the fact remains that the rich diversity of adult education makes it a difficult subject to study sociologically and this will be a recurrent theme throughout this text.

That something exists for the education of adults in a multitude of forms and organizations is undeniable, and as such constitutes a ‘social fact’, in Durkheim’s sense, that may be studied by the social analyst. However, sociological study of this diverse phenomenon is complicated by another factor; sociology itself is not a united discipline. Hence, no single sociological perpective exists which encourages a systematic study to be undertaken. Herein lies another major difficulty, since even if it were possible to determine the parameters of the education of adults, it is still necessary to recognise that any sociological perspective adopted may reflect only-one element of the discipline. Yet this does not mean that it is impossible to examine adult education from the social theorist’s perspective since, as McCullough points out, that it has both structures and processes. Significantly, but unsurprisingly, the differences between structures and processes reflect the differences between the major perspectives in social theory, so that before adult education is actually discussed it is necessary to clarify these different sociological schools of thought. Hence this chapter focuses both on the two different perspectives and, there-after, on schools of thought and ideologies, and concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the previous analysis for the study of adult and continuing education.

The Two Sociologies

The phrase ‘the two sociologies’ is the title of a well known paper by Dawe (1970) in which he argued that since sociology is concerned with both order and control in society two quite fundamentally different perspectives might be adopted. The first of these commences with the assumption that sociology is basically concerned with the problem of order and for society to exist at all social order must be imposed on individuals. Only when there is conformity to the rules of society can it actually exist and survive in time. The underlying point is that social order precedes the individual and if constraints are not imposed on persons then ‘man would run wild’ and chaos would reign. Social order consists of the boundary maintaining system, supported by and supporting the power structure of that society, so that its various elements are clearly demarcated. Boundary maintenance itself presupposes that the social system has some form of structure, i.e. certain properties that are independent of individuals (Giddens 1979:66).

One of the main criticisms of this approach is that man is regarded as nothing more than a reflection of the social order in which he has been socialized. He is no more than an automaton who has been enculturated into the social system, its values, meaning system, etc. and that all of his actions merely reflect that which has been imprinted upon him. If this were totally the case then ‘Brave New World’ would be a reality but, as it may be recalled, one of the concerns of that novel was with the non-conformist. This is a significant point since, as Wrong (1976:61–2) notes, there has been an intense concern among sociologists to construct an adequate theory of deviant behaviour. It was also Wrong (1961) who was among the first sociologists to criticise this approach to sociological analysis, suggesting that it resulted in an oversocialized conception of man. He recognised the validity of Freud’s insight, that man does not necessarily experience guilt when he does not conform to society’s norms, although he should if man were merely a reflex of the social system, but he often experiences it when he does conform. Hence, man must be more than merely a reflection of the social system. This does not, however, rule out the idea that man is socialized into the culture of his society, or else there would be little basis for social interaction but it does point to a much more sophisticated interpretation of that process. This will be referred to again in the section where human learning is analysed later in this text.

The notion of individuality is, therefore, one that is at the basis of the criticism of this approach to sociological analysis, so that it is the point at which Dawe’s other sociology’ may be examined. He suggests that the Enlightenment produced an intellectual realization that social institutions were man-made rather than divinely created. Hence, the key issue for other theorists has become that of autonomous man seeking to gain control over essentially man-made institutions. From this perspective, action constitutes attempts ‘to exert control over existing situations, relationships and institutions in such a way as to bring them into line with human constructions of their ideal meaning’. (Dawe, cited from Thompson and Tunstall 1972:547). It should be noted immediately that the phrase ‘ideal meaning’ opens up the whole issue of ideology, a point which will be discussed in the following section of this chapter and elsewhere in this book. In this approach the individual is regarded as an agent capable of making ‘casual interventions… in the on-going process of events-in-the-world.’ (Giddens 19 7 9:55). The social system is now regarded as the outcome of human action. The individual is free to act in this way although, as Goffman (1959) noted, the person usually manages to present himself in a way that he perceives to be acceptable to his fellow human beings. Hence, while he feels that he is free he is still constrained by his perception of others’ expectations of him, so that his approach is still open to the criticism that man is over-socialized (Wrong 1976:67), since man seeks conformity. The difference in the two approaches, according to Wrong, is that the former makes man appear to be all super-ego while the latter places the emphasis on the ego. Additionally, this approach tends to avoid the issues of power and structure.

Neither perspective, therefore, is beyond criticism: the strengths of the one tend to be the weaknesses of the other. Both approaches highlight some valid issues and yet in other ways they are in opposition to each other. Dawe summarises these differences thus:

There are, then, two sociologies: a sociology of the social system and a sociology of social action. They are grounded in diametrically opposed concerns about two central problems, those of order and control. And, at every level, they are in conflict. They posit antithetical views of human nature, of society and of the relationships between the social and the individual. The first asserts the paramount necessity, for societal and individual well-being, of external constraint; hence the notion of a social system ontologically and methodologically prior to its participants. The key to the second is that of autonomous man, able to realize his full potential and to create a truly human social order only when freed from external constraint. Society is thus the creation of its members: the product of their construction of meaning, and of the action and relationships through which they attempt to impose that meaning on their historical situations. (cited from Thompson and Tunstall 1972:550–1)

Obviously man cannot escape from the fact that he exists in a society so that structure and agency must co-exist and they must necessarily be interdependent if the social system is to survive in time. Social theory, however, is confronted with the dilemma of synthesizing apparently opposing perspectives in order to account for social reality. Whatever approach is adopted, its weaknesses may be seen in the strengths of the opposing viewpoint, so that synthesis is important in the development of social theory (see Giddens 1979) but since both approaches highlight different aspects of society and different facets of the education of adults both will be utilised in the following pages. Yet these two broadly different perspectives do not exhaust the differences within social theory and it is now necessary to focus upon some of the other variations before proceeding to an analysis of adult and continuing education.

Socioloaical Schools of Thought and Ideologies

Not only has social theory two main approaches, each of these may be sub-divided into a number of different schools of thought which, in turn, may relate to varying ideological perspectives. It is necessary to understand these before analysing the education of adults and this section follows the structure of the previous one.

Structural approaches to analysis have emerged in a number of the social sciences. Levi-Strauss (1968:279 ) suggested that social structures are models of the patterns of social relationships that exist within a given social system. The system may be treated as the actual functioning of those relationships. Two major schools of thought have emerged from this; that which analyses society ‘as it is’ and that which regards what is as morally repugnant and in need of change. The former is structural functionalism, often simply termed functionalism, and the latter is marxism: functionalism is inherently conservative in its ideological perspective simply because the starting point of the analysis is society as it is perceived to be while the other offers an idealistic alternative to what is and so condemns it.

Functionalism, associated with the work of Talcott Parsons (1951), views society as a complex social system, one that has become even more complex since the level of technology has become more sophisticated. Change, when it occurs, is of a gradual, evolutionary nature but as the system is regarded as cohesive, with each of the elements in functional harmony with every other, any change in one variable will automatically cause the remainder of the system to re-adjust in order to re-establish the social equilibrium. Man is the product of this social system and its culture is transmitted to him so that new generations are integrated into the existing social system without too great a disruption to its functioning; in this way it ensures its survival and maintenance through time.

Clearly there are major weaknesses in the functionalist perspective and Cohen (1968:47–64) summarised these as logical, substantive and ideological. Logically, he points out that functionalism is teleological (a phenomenon’s existence is explained by asserting ‘that’ it is necessary to bring about some other consequence) and this is inherently unacceptable since it treats an effect as a cause. Additionally, it is an untestable theory which also inhibits comparison and generalization. Substantively, it over-emphasizes the harmonious interrelationship of parts of the social system and it is unable to explain either persistence or change. Finally, functionalism is inherently conservative ideologically. However, Cohen (1968:64–65), while agreeing that some of these criticisms are justly founded, points out that functional analysis may be part of a genuine sociological explanation.

These criticisms have resulted in structural functionalism losing its dominant place in sociological theory in recent years and two major sets of responses have emerged, both suggest different structures to society and one of them concentrates upon an ideological perspective as well. They are discussed separately here in order to illustrate the differences in their response.

The social system as elaborated by the functionalists tended to play down the significance of power and class. The marxist analysis of the social structure concentrates upon these neglected issues and has received considerable attention. From this viewpoint society is regarded as having a substructure, the economic institution, and a superstructure; the shape and direction of change of the former determining the shape and direction of change of the latter. Hence, those who own (or control?) the substructure (the bourgeoisie) are in a position to exercise power over the remainder of society (the proletariat); the former do so for their own ends and to their own economic gain. This power need not be exercised overtly for much of the influence of the bourgeoisie is built into the social system and consequently exercised covertly, e.g. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony (Entwistle 1979:12–23). However, since there is a conflict of interests between thes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Sociological Perspectives
• Part II: A Sociology of a Teaching and Learning Curriculum
• Part III: Adult and Continuing Education in the Context of Society
• Part IV: Adult and Continuing Education in the Organizational Context
• Bibliography
• Index