Source: PIMA Bulletin 17, April 2018

Budd Hall’s note on ‘The Curious Incident of the Disappearance of the Policy Discourse of Adult Education in England’ revives the forgotten nature of adult education. It reminds the traditional memory of popular education, ranging from Latin America to Nordic countries, and workers education discourses in most of global contexts, especially in modern UK as well as contemporary Canada and Australia.

The modern history of Korean politics cannot be told without telling the history of labor movement and civil society movements. Adult education in any case stood for the sake of those who were deprived, underprivileged, and oppressed. A month ago, on my way to Germany by airplane, I happened to write a fable on the identity of adult education. It goes like this:

After created the world, God realized he made a huge mistake. Adam and Eve were illiterates, barely remembering what they were ordered to obey. Concerned with the ‘tree of knowledge’ happening again, He decided to educate them.

In the beginning, God created education. The education was formless and empty. The first day, God said “Let there be letters”, and there were letters. So the people were divided into the literates and the illiterates. The second day, God created Eden of education to be a holy place ceremonial by learning and teaching. God saw that it was good. The third day, God called the Eden ‘school’ and separated the form of learning into formal, non-formal, and informal. And it was so. The fourth day, God upgraded ‘the tree of knowledge (of good and evil)' at the center of the Eden, to produce various fruits of knowledge. Now He call it ‘university’. The fifth day, God so loved those who cannot read and write with compassion, so he sent his only begotten Son, ‘adult education’, to save them. The sixth day, God finally finished his work by making the whole world full of education, so He ordered “all life should live long in learning and education”, which today we call it ‘lifelong learning and lifelong education’. The seventh day, God rested.

This is what I made for a joke on the airplane heading to Wurzburg. I call it the ‘book of genesis of education Chapter 1’.

We have an image of adult education as a savior of the oppressed, a social changer. Katarina Popovic, the Secretary-General of ICAE strongly argued at a keynote, the International Conference of Educational Researches, October 2017 in Seoul, that the newly adventing lifelong learning policies deprived adult education of the main character of social changer. No more social movements with no more adult education as a game changer.  Despite more talks about adults, mostly in terms of their human resources aspect, the “radical” part as emancipator is gone, as Budd Hall critically asserted. Adult education is no longer ‘the only begotten son’ nowadays, but ‘those who are waiting for mercy’ for funding. Lifelong learning has taken its seat on God’s right hand, while adult education was crucified to save the people.

The discourse of adult education has been invisible behind the light of lifelong learning. I believe, lifelong learning is not only a matter of enhancing inputs, opportunities, provisions, or funding. We lost the spirit and philosophy of learning inherited from old generation of adult education, a social changer. Budd Hall once said that adult education is a surfer who surfs against gusty winds and waves of social movements. Today’s wind is still gusty, of course in different ways: From labor movement to environmental or gender issues, for example. From massive visible collectivism to personalized invisible virtual voices of network like SNS or #metoo, which are still strong enough to change the society. From massive strikes to mindfulness in candles, yellow umbrellas, and so on. I like to find the trace of adult education in the new modes of lifelong learning agendas. Is adult education too old to catch up new trends? Or still lively to rise from the ashes?