RELA_2025_1_Nohl_Directive_adult_education

2025-04-14 0 0 483.48KB 17 页 5.8玖币

侵权投诉

Nohl, Arnd-Michael

Directive adult education by political actors. Orientation expectations towards

adults in Germany

European journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 16 (2025) 1, S. 59-74

Quellenangabe/ Reference:

Nohl, Arnd-Michael: Directive adult education by political actors. Orientation expectations towards adults

in Germany - In: European journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 16 (2025) 1, S.

59-74 - URN: urn:nbn:de:0111-pedocs-327367 - DOI: 10.25656/01:32736; 10.3384/rela.2000-7426.4794

https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0111-pedocs-327367

https://doi.org/10.25656/01:32736

in Kooperation mit / in cooperation with:

http://www.ep.liu.se

Nutzungsbedingungen Terms of use

Dieses Dokument steht unter folgender Creative Commons-Lizenz:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de - Sie dürfen das Werk

bzw. den Inhalt vervielfältigen, verbreiten und öffentlich zugänglich machen

sowie Abwandlungen und Bearbeitungen des Werkes bzw. Inhaltes

anfertigen, solange Sie den Namen des Autors/Rechteinhabers in der von ihm

festgelegten Weise nennen.

This document is published under following Creative Commons-License:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en - You may copy, distribute

and render this document accessible, make adaptations of this work or its

contents accessible to the public as long as you attribute the work in the

manner specified by the author or licensor.

Mit der Verwendung dieses Dokuments erkennen Sie die

Nutzungsbedingungen an.

By using this particular document, you accept the above-stated conditions of

use.

Kontakt / Contact:

peDOCS

DIPF | Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation

Informationszentrum (IZ) Bildung

E-Mail: pedocs@dipf.de

Internet: www.pedocs.de

Helmut Schmidt University, Germany (nohl@hsu-hh.de)

This paper presents for discussion two empirically grounded theses. First, political actors

educate adults, and second, in doing so, they use directive forms of education; that is,

they expect adult members of society to adopt certain orientations. Following a

theoretical discussion on the directive education concept and its relevance to public

pedagogy, the methodology (discourse analysis and documentary method) is explained.

Then, three approaches to directive adult education demonstrated by political actors are

empirically analysed: (1) directive political education is employed by political party

leaders when, in the face of a potential U-turn of their party, they try to change the core

political convictions of party supporters; (2) newcomers to society are directively

educated to adopt democratic role orientations; and (3) in social fields in which practices

are standardised by laws but cannot sufficiently be controlled, directive education for the

common good can be observed. These types of directive education used by political actors

are discussed vis-à-vis the concepts of paternalism and pedagogization.

directive adult education, democracy, discourse analysis, paternalism,

pedagogization

The notion that adult education centres around facilitating self-directed learning processes

of (supposedly) autonomous adults has faced criticism from various strands of adult

education research. Drawing from a Foucauldian perspective, several analyses revealed

the power-driven subconscious processes of subject formation that occur within adult

education, often unnoticed by both the participants and the educators themselves (see, for

instance, Fejes & Nicoll, 2008). Conversely, other scholars argue that, if necessary, it is

the responsibility of adult educators to guide adults beyond their own intentions,

particularly when these adults are still acquiring the capacity to ‘think like an adult’

(Mezirow, 2000). With reference to critical adult education, which urges adults to

question their previous (problematic) views, Brookfield (2009, p. 218) alludes to ‘the

inevitably directive nature of education.’ The paternalism inherent in such processes of

adult education is considered legitimate as long as educators act in the best interests of

their participants (Fuhr, 2013, p. 31).

This article aligns with the criticism that adult education should not be reduced to

facilitating self-directed learning processes of (supposedly) autonomous adults. However,

the focus of the article differs in two key respects from this criticism. Firstly, it examines

processes wherein adults, over a sustained period and reinforced by (threatened)

sanctions, are communicatively and overtly expected to adopt specific orientations put

forward by others, devoid of taking any individual interests in learning into account.

Secondly, such kind of a directive adult education is not carried out by adult educators

but, as particular focus of this article, by political actors who do not seem to grant adult

members of the society the autonomy to decide how they wish to orient themselves but,

rather, seek to prescribe these orientations.

A notable instance of such a directive adult education by political leaders can be

found in the speech delivered by Germany’s then chancellor, Angela Merkel, in the

Bundestag (the federal parliament of Germany) in the autumn of 2020, which coincided

with the onset of the second wave of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. In her

address, Merkel spoke not only to parliamentarians but to all citizens:

I appeal to all of you: adhere to the rules that must also apply in the coming period. Let us,

as citizens of this society, collectively take greater care of each other. Let’s remind one

another that maintaining our distance, wearing nose-mouth protection, regularly washing

our hands, ventilating rooms, and using the Corona warning app, safeguards not only the

elderly and not only the so-called at-risk individuals but our open, free society as a whole.

(as cited in Deutscher Bundestag, 2020, p. 22527; translated by the author).

In the Bundestag, laws and regulations typically become the centre of contentious debate

among Parliament members. The chancellor’s appeal to the entire spectrum of society to

comply with these regulations was extraordinary but deemed necessary from her

standpoint. ‘After all’, as Merkel emphasised, ‘all rules, regulations, and measures are of

little or no use if they are not accepted and adhered to by the people’.

With these final words, she articulated a problem that is encountered not only during

existential crises, such as a pandemic, but constantly: all states, particularly democratic

ones, rely on the responsive conduct of their population, yet, lack the capacity to entirely

enforce such conduct through legislation. When political actors in democracies find that

instilling a certain willingness to act has become necessary, they may resort to

communicatively expecting adult citizens to adopt certain orientations. While political

actors usually seek, through persuasive communication or even demagogy, to generate

support for specific political decisions (for example, for the government’s pandemic

legislation), in processes of directive adult education, they prefer to strongly suggest a

way of acting that people should incorporate into their routine lives as habit (such as

wearing a mask). Although these political actors may not perceive their actions to

constitute the educating of adults, they rely on an eminently pedagogical practice to

communicate their messages.

The empirical findings presented in this article illustrate the way the state and other

political actors communicatively expect adult members of the society to adopt certain

orientations and, thus, the way those actors seek to educate adults in a directive way.

Through these findings, two neglected aspects of adult education are put into the

limelight: 1) political leaders may participate in educating adult members of society, and

2) they may do so by expectantly guiding adults towards specific orientations, but without

taking necessarily their individual needs into account. The first aspect has been only

briefly touched upon in discussions on ‘public pedagogies’; the latter is often

counterintuitive, as only children and adolescents are generally assumed to be educated

in a directive manner. By contrast, adults are commonly perceived to acquire orientations

on their own, given their presumedly developed level of self-responsibility and maturity.

To elaborate on these two claims, I first explain my understanding of directive

education. I then discuss the concept of public pedagogy, which aids in analysing

directive educational processes for adults that unfold tacitly and are not part of a formal

education system. After introducing the methodological background of my research, I

delve into three forms of directive education employed by political actors that I

empirically analysed.1 Firstly, directive political education becomes relevant when, in the

course of a potential U-turn by a political party, its leaders attempt to change the core

political convictions of party supporters. The second form of directive education I

investigate is directive democracy education, which does not revolve around specific

political world views but, instead, concerns attitudes towards democracy itself. For

example, individuals perceived as newcomers to society, such as adolescents and adult

immigrants, undergo educational means of directive democracy education. The third form

of directive education employed by political actors that I examine is directive education

for the common good. Certain areas in society are regulated by laws that are, however,

unable to sufficiently control people’s behaviour. In cases related to, for example, waste

separation, unemployment or the fight against pandemics, forms of directive education

for the common good can be observed.

Although the empirical examples I use to substantiate my theses are drawn from the

German context, they are in my view relevant to adult education in other democracies as

well. This applies especially to the two theoretical aspects through which I discuss my

empirical findings: Directive adult education implies an asymmetrical relationship

between political actors and the populace, which can be problematised as paternalism.

Simultaneously, whether the (usually tacit) employment of pedagogical means by

political actors results in an illegitimate pedagogization of political problems, should be

considered as well.

On a conceptual level and within the framework of an ideal-typical procedure, the concept

of directive education gets clearer by juxtaposing it with non-directive education: in

German, by comparing Erziehung to Bildung. Non-directive education necessarily

includes ‘autonomous opinion formation’ (Kloubert, 2018, p. 140) for which, for

example, ‘methods for evaluating the truth and falsehood, or relative probability, of

various claims about the world’ are taught, and adult learners are exposed to divergent

life projects and world views together with their respective critique (Brighouse, 1998, p.

736). An important feature of non-directive education is the space given to controversies:

that is, the space allowed for discourse on divergent world views pertaining to the topic

under discussion. This ‘multiperspectivity’ (Sander, 2004, p. 9) can sometimes even help

people to question their own ‘meaning perspectives’ and – in the sense of a transformation

process – open new perspectives (Mezirow, 1978). Even without leading to

transformation, non-directive education has similarities with Bildung (Kloubert, 2018).

Implied here is the role of the adult educator as a ‘non-directive facilitator working to

realise learners’ agendas’ (Brookfield, 2004, p. 380). This can be contrasted with the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.8 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载

摘要：

Nohl,Arnd-MichaelDirectiveadulteducationbypoliticalactors.OrientationexpectationstowardsadultsinGermanyEuropeanjournalforResearchontheEducationandLearningofAdults16(2025)1,S.59-74Quellenangabe/Reference:Nohl,Arnd-Michael:Directiveadulteducationbypoliticalactors.Orientationexpectationstowardsadultsin...

展开>> 收起<<

RELA_2025_1_Nohl_Directive_adult_education.pdf

共17页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

RELA_2025_1_Nohl_Directive_adult_education

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: