Using Aristotle’s Four Causes to Evaluate and Revise Adult Education Programs

Abstract

Over 2000 years ago, Aristotle wrote of four distinct causes at play in the world we know. Those causes, the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause, were meant to refer to ontological and, by extension, epistemological concerns, and were powerful enough to be seized upon and used in some form by those of very different philosophical persuasions (i.e., rational humanists and neo-Thomists). These four types of causes are introduced here as an analytical tool to conduct both formative and summative curriculum assessments, and as a tool to analyze and develop curriculum. The fourth cause, particularly, adds analytical power to present program review conceptions because it positions the result of the program as a cause, rather than a mere output.