Alasdair Macintyre's Idea of an Educated Public and ‘Informal’ Adult Education in Scotland

Abstract

Scotland has a particular history, that moves around the unique public experiences of the Enlightenment and the Act of Union as defining moments that could have developed differently. For complex reasons, public thinking moved more and more towards the fractured moral and political conditions that we know now. But, following the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, this paper argues that by re-engaging the issues of an educated public found in the early years of Scotland's eighteenth century, the dialogic processes of adult education could still move things on to a more coherent and positive future where ‘community based’ learning could no longer be thought about as marginal. The traditions of adult education would have to be considered far more central in the recreation of an educated public and a healthy participative democracy.