Response to Andragogy: Helping Adults Learn

 

     Malcolm Knowles' "Six Assumptions of Adult Learning" seeks to establish a framework for adult teaching and learning that is decidedly different than what has been most commonly used in the West in the education of students from kindergarten through high school. As Patricia Williams explains thoroughly in her post, Knowles believed that adults bring a very different set of characteristics to the classroom in the broad categories of self-concept, experience, readiness, orientation, motivation, and need to know.

 

Andragogy vs. Pedagogy

 

     For Knowles, the passive learning pedagogy used on the young in which teachers acted as a "sage on a stage" with very little regard for the needs and desires of their students was wholly inadequate if not poisonous for the adult learning community. Like the Brazilian educator and social reconstructionist, Paulo Freire, Knowles saw adult learners as having reached a stage in life where simply “banking knowledge”, as Freire described it, for withdrawal as intellectual currency on standardized tests was unfulfilling and even a cause for disdain. Outside of the educational setting, as Williams also rightly points out, insensitivity to the needs of adults in any other setting (such as business training) will also result in futility and resentment.

     Knowles theory of “andragogy” is posed as an alternative to pedagogy which is spawn from the behaviorist stream of learning “where the student takes for granted what is being said to them and they learn it word for word so they can receive positive feedback from their lecturers (McGrath, 2009). Though some have questioned whether or not Knowles assumptions really fall into the category of a “theory” and pointed to the lack of empirical evidence to support his claims, andragogy has resonated with many in adult education and training because it encourages students to “return to education and by allowing them to participate they are treating them like equals, and the student is no longer dependent on them for learning as they would have been when they were children in the primary and secondary school” (McGrath, 2009).

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Application to General Educational Thought

 

     Though our consideration of Knowles’ work takes place in the context of a course in adult learning, I contend that what he proposes represents sound educational philosophy at any level. Even if someone has not reached the level of taking responsibility for their own learning, experiencing the enjoyment and satisfaction of new knowledge, and applying it to their own lives through intellectual or physiological maturity, the approach that Knowles advocates has the best chance of fostering it. As someone who has spent most of my life in K-12 education as a teacher and administrator, I see the absolute necessity of engaging all learners on an appropriate level as seekers of knowledge that is validated by continual exploration of practical problems in the classroom and in personal life.

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Otherwise, education becomes a wasteland of isolation. “From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. This is the isolation of the school – its isolation from life” (Dewey, 1990). My work with adult learners has shown me that adults, by virtue of their experiences and both internal and external motivating factors, are even less able to live in such a wasteland than their adolescent counterparts. Yet adult education is often just an extension of what they were subjected to in their earlier schooling and “as a result of this experience, adults may be unwilling to participate in an adult education type course later in life as they have the perception that the same style of teaching and learning is still in existence in today’s classroom.

 

The Challenge Ahead 

 

     I see the challenge ahead in adult education as being tied directly to the greater effort in our society to wrench teaching and learning from the grasp of behaviorism and political/social assimilation. Applying Knowles’ assumptions means a profound power shift that restores education to its rightful place as the conduit for personal and social responsibility and growth. Only then can we hope to tap into the enormous power of the human mind and those who shape it.

 

References:

Dewey, J. (1990). The school and society and the child and the curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pg. 75.

McGrath, V. (2009). Revewing the evidence on how adult students learn: An examination of Knowles' model of andragogy. Adult Learner: The Irish Journal of Adult and Community Education. 99-110.