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Community Adult Education: A Comparative Analysis of Theory and Practice

It is an oft-repeated truism, no less potent for its familiarity, that the United States and United Kingdom use a common language but grant to that language widely differing meanings. For example, interpretation of the term "adult education" is characterized by considerable conceptual confusion. British adult educators still maintain that their field focuses on the development of personhood or on furthering the understanding of the central principles, standards of discrimination, and operations deemed intrinsic to a subject or set of skills. In the United States, however, cited examples of adult education activities would probably include professional continuing education, management training, and cooperative education. To this extent, Americans favor the inversion by which adult education is simply redefined as the education of adults. British analytic philosophers, on the other hand, consider determining the existence of the activity of adult education by the nature of its participants entirely inadmissible. These philosophers locate themselves in the tradition whereby the content and conduct of an activity determine whether it is educational; to label an activity "adult education" simply because adults are present (the American inclination) is not enough. An activity is deemed educational only if those learners involved are being initiated into worthwhile bodies of knowledge in a morally acceptable manner. This article considers what appears to be one area of practice--community adult education-that, in terms of its underlying rationale and institutional implementations, highlights the differing meanings and interpretations placed on adult education practice in the two countries. As I have noted elsewhere, "community" is a word of great emotional potency in the vocabulary of adult education.' To claim to meet the community's needs is to assert one's credentials as a humanistic, concerned adult educator. The phrase, therefore, functions as a "premature ultimate" in that its invocation precludes further debate on the adult educator's professional responsibilities. The air of reverence surrounding the term serves to prevent critical scrutiny of what constitutes community adult education. This results in almost any activity involving adult students