Abstract
As American adult educators today worry about the current climate of social injustice and democratic indifference, so too do the European editors and chapter authors in Remaking Communities and Adult Learning. Concerned with the excessive “instrumentalism” they detect in formal adult education in Europe and other locations, they regard a strengthening of “popular education,” learning that takes place through community-based activities, as the best way forward. Thus, the book offers American academics engaged in critical analyses of social and political realities an opportunity to listen to international voices similarly engaged. Their concerns are comparable—inequality, oppression, climate change—but their examples of positive educational experiences come from unfamiliar contexts and are often interpreted through the lens of theories less well known in the United States (e.g., Gelpi, 1998).
Examples from the book of interesting place-based experiential learning ranged from describing novel community responses to COVID in Spain (Chapter 14), to tracking 96 relatively new museums, the first originating in Germany, devoted to the history of the women's fight for equality (Chapter 6), to analyzing post-Yugoslavia “migrating biographies” of families in Poland that migrated from Bosnia (Chapter 8). Many writers also advocated for “participatory research,” knowledge arising from “the people” rather than academic researchers, such as analyses of extensive interviews of those who had lived through a devastating earthquake in Mexico (Chapter 9), or of two professional emigrant mediators, migrants themselves from Burundi and Madagascar now living in Belgium and France (Chapter 13).
Two points stressed heavily in the opening chapters of the book were that (1) as compared to community learning, formal schooling fails to address or solve today's social problems, and (2) the past legacy of adult education with its emphasis on democracy and social justice offers a better educational model for a way forward. While many chapters were fascinating, their relevance to these points was not always clear and, indeed, seemed at times to contradict them. For example, acquiring knowledge from museum presentations is much more akin to formal education than community-based learning. While the need for women's rights originated on the ground, subsequent growing support for these rights coming from museum presentations and modern-day classrooms contradicts the mutually exclusive educational duality the book promotes. Moreover, “popular education”—learning in the community directed by the voice of the people—is as likely to promote anti-democratic as social justice outcomes. Indeed, in Chapter 4 the author describes quite disappointing results from the European Commission's efforts across five countries to promote democratic practices solely through participatory and relational community education.
Progressive educators would argue that the flaw in many communities and Freirean-based civic and emancipatory education programs is a failure to understand the critical importance of student agency in learning. As Biesta (following the lead of John Dewey) has often pointed out, teachers may guide students in certain directions, but in a truly democratic society, they must allow students in consultation with each other to come to their own conclusions. If students, whether young or adult, cannot be so trusted, if teachers, whether in formal or informal contexts, feel compelled to tell them how and what to think (as Biesta, 2017 notes are inherent in the Freirean model), they are, in effect, teaching them to follow the direction of authorities.
In the final chapter, the editors acknowledged that none of the examples of community learning presented had resulted in any significant societal change. However, the pockets of humanity that were often vividly presented offered them signs of hope, which in our view are likely to bear fruit only through changes in practice in both formal and community education. As cited in several chapters, a UNESCO report (Delors, 1996) asserted that education for democracy must teach students “how to learn, to do, to be, and to live together,” which leads us to ask: Is it so impossible to imagine that our schools (starting from the earliest years) could teach people to become self-directed learners, to reflect upon who they are, and to respect, value, and work with those holding diverse world views? Is there any reason we adult educators could not also champion that kind of curriculum for our students?