Values, Education and the Adult (International Library of the Philosophy of Education Volume 16)

R.W.K. Paterson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415653121
• eBook ISBN: 9781135170530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this study of the main conceptual and normative issues to which the education of the adult gives rise, the author demonstrates that these issues can be understood and resolved only by coming to grips with some of the central and most contentious questions in epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social philosophy. A salient feature of the book is its searching examination of the different types of value judgement by which all educational discourse is permeated. The analysis of the nature and justification of educational judgements forms the basis of an overall philosophy of adult education which should provide a much needed axiological framework for the guidance of practitioners in this growing area of educational concern.

Part I
The concept of ‘adult education’

1
Adulthood and education

It is significant that we distinguish adult education from other forms of educational provision by reference to the nature of its clients. Primary, secondary, further, and higher education are differentiated from one another in terms of notional stages in the unfolding of the educational enterprise. Technical, physical, and moral education are differentiated from one another and from legal or medical education in terms of their distinctive contents and objectives. But, if nomenclature is any guide, the vast assortment of activities which are collectively styled ‘adult education’ derive whatever common character they have from the character of the clients, actual and potential, on whose behalf they are initiated. Naturally, within this heterogeneous collection of activities different levels of operation are recognized, and the multitude of programmes of study evince a multitude of distinguishable objectives and spheres of concern. However, if for most purposes we marshal this astonishing miscellany of activities under the generic name of ‘adult education’, this is solely because they are felt to partake of a common identity rooted in the characteristic needs, claims, and circumstances of adults as a distinct genus of educational beneficiaries. To elucidate the concept of ‘adult education’, then, we require to elucidate the concept of an ‘adult’.

This is by no means as straightforward as it may seem. We use the term ‘adult’, as noun or as adjective, in different contexts with differing overtones and emphases. Thus, when an anthropologist speaks of the average height and weight of the adults in some society, he does so in a context where the accent is on processes of physical growth and development. When a critic refers to an adult novel or play, he is claiming that it solicits a certain maturity of response from the reader or spectator. When a newspaper advertisement promises that a forthcoming pantomime will be heartily enjoyed by adults, it is acknowledging that the entertainment is principally devised for the benefit of children. When a man tells his sixteen-year-old son that he is not yet an adult, he may be reminding him that some of his claims and expectations are inappropriate because premature. And in a wide variety of contexts the term ‘adult’ is put to a wide variety of uses, with continuously changing implications and readily discernible shifts of emphasis.

Common to all these uses, of course, is the focal contrast of the adult with the child. What is adult is contrasted, in this or that respect and for this or that purpose, with what is adolescent, juvenile, or infantile. An adult has been a child but is no longer one. Adulthood is a state into which he has passed, from a state of childhood which he has quitted. His passage into adulthood is not conceived as a bare movement through time, however, for central to the concept of an adult is the idea that this state is attained by a process of growth. Adults are what children grow up to become. To be an adult is to have reached a certain stage of development, and, moreover, to have reached a stage which is thought of as in some sense final, an end-stage of a process of development which confers meaning and direction on the earlier stages of the process. Within the state of adulthood, as within the state of childhood, there may be earlier and later phases, from young adulthood to senility, but one does not pass from adulthood into some altogether distinct and novel state, at least within the bounds of our natural lives. ‘Second childhood’ is a condition which only adults can suffer. Once an adult, in short, always an adult.

Although in recognizing that someone is an adult we are recognizing that he has reached a certain stage of development, it does not follow that the concept of an adult is a straightforwardly empirical concept. In saying that someone is an adult we are not simply saying that his physical development is complete, or that his mental capacities and attainments, his qualities of character, and his social awareness and skill have developed to some given degree, for we might say all this of a precocious child. Indeed, we are not necessarily saying anything about his degree of physical, mental, and social development, for we acknowledge that many adults are physically stunted, mentally retarded, or socially backward. The stage of development which the adult has reached cannot be equated with any particular stage of physical, mental, or social development. In calling someone an ‘adult’ we are not claiming that he has any one empirical characteristic or set of empirical characteristics. We are not describing, however vaguely, his appearance, state of mind, or behaviour. In calling someone an ‘adult’ we are rather ascribing to him a certain status, a status which derives its significance from contrast with the status of a child and which he gains only after relinquishing the status of a child. If adulthood represents an end-stage of development, this is because it unalterably revokes the previous status of the individual who has now attained adulthood, and it can never itself be revoked in favour of any higher status into which the individual may pass from adulthood.

Now, the concept of ‘status’ (while it may need empirical criteria for its correct application) is preeminently a normative concept. It enshrines valuations, priorities, estimates of regard. Enfolded within the concept of ‘status’ there are all kinds of prescriptions and prohibitions, licences and requirements. In particular, a person’s status comprises the ethical requirement that he act in certain specific ways and be treated by others in certain specific ways—and indeed the precise specification of these ways in large measure yields the precise specification of the status he enjoys. To be an adult, then, is to possess a certain status, with inherent proprieties and forms of comportment, inherent obligations and rights. When we consider someone an adult, we consider that there are distinctive compliances, modes of respect, which he may rightfully demand of us, and that there are natural dispositions, qualities of concern, which we may rightfully demand of him.

Among the various rights and duties of adults, there are some which have little direct relevance to the adult as a participant in education. A man has a duty to keep any promises he has made, and he has a right to choose his own friends, but it can hardly be claimed that the application of either of these principles seriously affects the scope and character of his educational needs and interests. There are other rights and duties of the adult which are of more direct relevance to his participation in education, but which he has in common with children and which therefore have no special implications for adult education in particular. It is in virtue of his general status as a moral agent, not in virtue of his special status as an adult, that he has a duty to tolerate the expression of opinions different from his own, and that he has a right to equality of consideration along with others.

However, inherent in the status of adult there are numerous valuations and requirements which do have considerable significance for the adult as a participant in education and which do not apply in anything like the same degree to children. Thus an adult is expected to take a full share in the tasks of the society to which he belongs, and to bear some measure of responsibility for the internal life and external acts of his society. He is expected to play his part in actively bettering his society, in raising its quality of life and in making it a wiser and more just society. It is to the adult that we ascribe the duty of recognizing and caring for those things which are enduringly valuable in our civilization and in the natural environment, for we rightly believe that natural beauties and works of art, bodies of knowledge and insight, economic and technological advances, social institutions and freedoms, in short everything worthwhile that can be preserved and transmitted by intelligence and care is held by the present generation of mature men and women in trust for future generations. The adult, moreover, is in an important sense charged with caring for himself: we ascribe to him the duty to be mindful of his own deepest interests, to cultivate whatever talents he may possess, and to accept responsibility for his moral character and conduct and for the development of his qualities as a person.

The adult is also distinguished from the child by his enjoyment in high degree of various entitlements and prerogatives, many of which also have the greatest significance for his participation in education. An adult has a right to share in the making of decisions which affect his wellbeing. As a full member of the community, he has a right to share in the making of many decisions which affect the wellbeing of others, even when his own wellbeing is not directly involved. He is entitled to frame his life and conduct his personal affairs as he alone thinks fit, provided only that his obligations to others are met and that in his free initiatives he does not injure other men’s legitimate interests or infringe their spheres of liberty. An adult is entitled to consult with whom he chooses, on whatever topics are of moment to him; he is entitled to seek opinions from whatever quarters he pleases, and to accept or ignore these according to his own free decision.

Unlike many of the ‘rights’ which are ascribed to children, the rights of adults are fully rights: they are discretionary claims, which he may choose to exercise or not to exercise according to his own unconstrained wishes and judgment. The fact that in some societies many adults are prevented from exercising their rights, and perhaps in addition absolved from performing some of the duties which rightly pertain to their status as adults, in no way affects the character or limits the scope of these rights and duties, which depend solely on certain proprieties inherent in the status of adulthood, not on the contingent circumstance of these proprieties being recognized. And the fact that in our own society individual adults may be debarred from exercising certain rights or exempted from performing certain duties, usually on grounds of incapacity, in no way diminishes their validity, which like the validity of all norms is always subject to a variety of relevant conditions being satisfied.

When we characterize someone as an ‘adult’, then, we are ascribing to him various prima facie rights and duties, which may in exceptional circumstances be rescinded but which are normally operative, just as a debtor may sometimes be released from his debts or a creditor denied his rights of recovery if good cause can be shown, although this by no means impairs the prima facie duties and rights inherent in the status of ‘debtor’ or ‘creditor’ as such. The proprieties which reside in the status of adult qua adult may and do lapse in individual cases, when they are overridden by more fundamental ethical considerations, but this does not in the slightest alter the general requirements which we hold to be intrinsic to the status of an adult as such.

On what grounds, however, do we feel it necessary to distinguish and identify these proprieties, these rights and duties, which constitute the status of the adult? We distinguish some men as ‘debtors’ and others as ‘creditors’ in virtue of an actual economic relationship, involving the objective exchange of money, goods, or services, and we identify individual debtors and creditors by reference to observable transactions which have taken place, from which their status as ‘creditors’ or ‘debtors’ flows. By reference to what actual characteristics do we distinguish those individuals on whom we correctly confer the status of ‘adult’? In virtue of what objective qualities or relationships do we correctly ascribe to some human beings, but not to others, those rights and duties which are intrinsic to ‘adulthood’?

Adults are not held to be adults because they have larger bodies than children, or because they have greater intelligence, since this is often not in fact the case. Nor is it because their bodies and intelligences have ceased developing: physical and intellectual growth commonly ceases before adulthood is reached, and in any case we would continue to consider someone aged thirty or forty an adult even if at that age he made a belated spurt of physical or intellectual development. It is not because a man has wider knowledge than a child that he is considered to be an adult, for some children are more knowledgeable than some adults. Nor is it because he makes a more tangible contribution to society: elderly or disabled adults make little or no tangible contribution to society, while some adolescents may be doing hard and dangerous work or performing essential services.

Perhaps, since adulthood is a status, with inheirent ethical requirements, we should expect to locate the criteria justifying the conferment of this status a little nearer to the realm of the ethical. Perhaps our judgment that someone is an adult rests on our judgment that he possesses certain moral qualities, certain qualities of character, which coalesce to form a distinctive body of claims to adult status: to evince such qualities as prudence, self-control, patience, fortitude, tolerance, and objectivity, is, we might think, to have good claims to the dignity of adulthood. Kindred to these moral qualities there are deeply personal qualities which have an undeniable cognitive dimension but which are intimately interwoven with the individual’s capacities for emotion and feeling—mature human insight, the perceptiveness of compassion, the imaginative understanding of another’s situation, an unembarrassed responsiveness to the needs of others, a capacity for forming meaningful, stable, and realistic relationships: we might well judge that such personal qualities of balanced concern and involvement, when manifested in sufficient degree, constitute excellent grounds for the ascription of adulthood. No doubt our recognition of these moral qualities and personal capacities depends in part on valuations, appraisals, normative judgments, but equally there is no doubt that these qualities and capacities are objective characteristics discernible in the observable character and conduct of actual men and women. We might well want to take into account, also, the network of responsibilities—in the family, in the community, at work—which the individual has undertaken to carry, for we expect an adult to be able and willing to shoulder many different types of responsibility and to discharge them efficiently and without fuss. Finally, we might consider that an individual’s title to adulthood rests in part on his length and breadth of experience, not in the sense of a mere catalogue of passively received impressions, but ‘experience’ in the sense of actively lived experience which has refined and at the same time strengthened the individual’s relations with the world and with his fellows.

The trouble is that very many people who are unquestionably adults do not come anywhere near to satisfying these criteria, Many adults are foolish, weak, impulsive, self-deluding, or egotistical, and by comparison with many adolescents and even quite young children their qualities of character are meagre and inglorious. By the side of some perceptive and sympathetic children, who may show surprising quickness and depth of understanding, many adults appear emotionally obtuse, lacking in insight and sensitivity, and neither self-aware enough nor self-forgetful enough to make real connections with other people. They may shrink from responsibility, or prove woefully inadequate to discharge the responsibilities they have reluctantly incurred. And in too many cases age may not even bring instructive experience, but merely an increasingly mute mass of repetitive and undifferentiated commonplaces.

Yet we are surely right in surmising that the status of adulthood is very closely connected with these moral qualities and personal capacities, with the acceptance of responsibilities and the building-up of a meaningful body of experience. It is not so much that an adult must actually possess attributes and competencies of these various kinds. It is rather that an adult is someone whom we may justifiably presume to possess them. If we treat our neighbour as an adult, with the rights and duties intrinsic to that status, this is because we feel entitled to presume, for example, that in appropriate circumstances he will show restraint and impartiality, concern and understanding in some sufficient degree, and that he will accept a certain amount of responsibility and prove capable of drawing on his relevant experience with some measure of sense and skill. We do not normally feel entitled to presume any such attributes and competencies on the part of our neighbour’s young child. Unless we have reasons to the contrary, that is, we shall form one set of expectations of the father and a quite different—and much more limited—set of expectations of the child. In the event, we may be disappointed in the father and pleasantly surprised by the child, but unless there are good reasons obviously annulling our original expectations of the father (an exonerating handicap, for example, or perhaps his exceptionally adverse circumstances) we shall feel and be justifiably disappointed in him. We do have justifiable presumptions concerning the attributes and competencies of different categories of people, and although we are often disappointed or surprised in individual cases, those cases in which our disappointment or surprise is justifiable at least demonstrate the justice if not the accuracy of our original presumptions. We may in the event be mistaken about individual soldiers, policemen, or doctors, but we are justified in expecting soldiers to be alert and courageous, policemen to be helpful and fair-minded, and doctors to be skilled and solicitous, all in their characteristic ways and in appropriate degrees. Similarly, we are justified in expecting a very much larger category of people to exhibit certain very basic moral and personal attributes and competencies, and it is because these very basic expectations are just (whether in individual cases they are accurate or not) that we are justified in ascribing to this large and assorted body of people all the rights and duties which are intrinsic to the status of adulthood.

An adult, then, may not be morally and emotionally mature, but we are entitled to expect him to be so, and he is an adult because he is a rightful object of such expectations. We are still left, however, with the unanswered question: on what grounds are we entitled to form these expectations of one individual, the father, but not of another, the child?

The answer to this question is, I think, deceptively obvious. It is, quite simply, because the father is older than the child. Adults are adults, in the last analysis, because they are older than children. For legislative purposes, of course, most modern states use age as the criterion for distinguishing adults from children, and it might seem as if age is used merely because it is administratively the easiest criterion to apply on a large scale though in itself purely arbitrary as a criterion of adulthood. This would be erroneous, however. In point of fact, age is not administratively the easiest of criteria to apply (height would be considerably easier), and while no doubt there is a margin of arbitrariness in adopting a particular age for the criterion of adulthood and applying it right across the population, the choice of age as such is completely in tune with what we intuitively perceive to be the permanent human realities underlying and underwriting the concept of an adult. If it is on grounds of age that we rightly form one set of expectations of the father and a different, more limited, and less demanding set of expectations of his son, ascribing to one the status of adult and to the other the status of child, this is because we correctly deem their difference of age to have in itself the greatest ethical and existential relevance.

Of course, we do in fact observe a fairly close correlation between a person’s age and his degree of actual moral and emotional maturity, and our general experience that older people do in fact tend to be in varying degrees more mature leads us to ‘expect’ them to be more mature in that purely descriptive sense of ‘expect’ in which we expect it to snow in January. However, there is a normative sense of ‘expect’, the sense in which even known liars are expected to tell the truth and are only blamed because we rightly expect them to do what we anticipate they will probably not in fact do; and it is above all in this normative sense that we expect moral and emotional maturity from older people, justifiably ascribing to them the status of adults in this legitimate expectation. In and of itself, we feel, age ought to have recruited an appropriate combination of those moral and personal attributes and competencies in presumption of which we consider older people to merit the status of adulthood with all its intrinsic proprieties.

There is nothing arbitrary or paradoxical in our judgment that a person’s age, the mere fact that a certain period of time has elapsed since his birth, should of itself generate fresh dimensions of moral ide...

Table of contents

• Contents
• General editor’s note
• Part I The concept of ‘adult education’
• Part II Educational objectives
• Part III Educational processes
• Part IV Adult education and society
• Notes
• Index