The Meaning of Adult Education
By Eduard Christian Lindeman
"Each of us," wrote Anatole France, "must even be allowed to
possess two or three philosophies at the same time," for the
purpose, I presume, of saving our thought from the deadly
formality of consistency. No one can write about education,
particularly adult education, without deserting at various points
all "schools “of pedagogy, psychology and philosophy.
In-congruities are obvious: one cannot, for ex-ample, be a
determinist and at the same time advocate education; nor can
idealism be made to fit the actualities of life without
re of the material limitations which surround living
organisms. One cannot, that is, make use of these sed points
of view if they are conceived to be mutually-exclusive. But it is
precisely because I do not so regard them that all are included
in this essay. Light comes from learning — just as creation comes
everywhere -through integrations, syntheses, not through
exclusions.
The essay which follows will be best under-stood in the light of
personal experience. My formal education began at the age of
twenty-one — after I had spent twelve years in various
occupations and industries. I could, of course, speak the English
language (at least, the Americanized version which workers used)
but it was not my natural medium of communication. My initiation
to formal education was, next to the unsuccessful attempt to
adjust myself to automatic machines, the most perplexing and
baffling experience of my existence. The desire somehow to free
education from stifling ritual, formalism and institutionalism
was probably born in those frantic hours spent over books which
mystified and confused my mind. I had already earned my way in
the world from the age of nine, had learned the ship-building
trade, had participated in strikes, and somehow none of the
learning I was asked to do seemed to bear even the remotest
relation to my experience. Out of this confusion worse confounded
(confounded confusion, someone has called it) grew the hope that
someday education might be brought out of college halls and into
the lives of the people who do the work of the world. Later I
came to see that these very people who perform productive tasks
were themselves creating the experience out of which education
might emerge. In 1920 I visited Denmark, not primarily to study
education but to pick up lost ancestral threads — a quest which
arose from my dislocated youth. Here I came into contact with a
civilization which, by sheer contrast with hate- ridden Europe,
seemed like a cultural oasis in the desert of nationalism.
Whereas the victorious nations were grasping for territory,
Danish statesmen were conducting a scientific study to determine
how much of...
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