Our professor asked us to pose ourselves a question, and then to write an annotation of an article that might begin to help us answer the question. I used a question that I read in our textbook:
“Should we be responding to the individual learner or to the issues and concerns of society? Or do we somehow try to do both? Furthermore, if we consolidate our efforts to address the needs of society, is our task to support the status quo or to challenge it?” (Merriam & Brockett, 2007, p.89-90)
Merriam, S. B., & Brockett, R. G. (2007). The Profession and practice of adult education: An introduction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
It's an impossible question to answer of course, and I am prone to existential crises: what is good and what is right and what is ethical? And by what measure do we decide?
Although I am unable to answer the original question, I am intrigued by Holst's redefining of training to include both "mastery of action" and "mastery of principle" and I wonder of myself as a teacher, especially as I teach ESL. My students are desperate for the practical, for the quick-fix English they need in their everyday lives and I think I am caving in to their demands. Am I cheating them by requiring less and less mastery of principle?
Holst, J. D. (2009). Conceptualizing training in the radical adult education tradition. Adult Education Quarterly, 59(4), 318–334. doi:10.1177/0741713609334140
John D. Holst, Associate Professor in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Administration at University of St. Thomas, challenges the field of adult education to consider the pedagogical strategies of radical social movement organizations (SMO) through a historical and philosophical review of primary and secondary sources from the Citizenship Schools, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Landless Movement in Brazil, and the Recovered Factory Movement in Argentina. Holst argues that the concept of training has been narrowed through neoliberal economic influence to include only “mastery of action”, where a worker becomes skilled in order to perform a job and produce profits. The democratic and participatory pedagogical practice of SMOs employed a broader definition that integrates “mastery of principles and mastery of action in a way that sees these two in dialectal relationship” (Holst, 2009, p. 323) by empowering disenfranchised individuals to become full agents of their circumstances. However, while Holst criticizes neoliberalism for glorifying profits and minimizing the worker, he also asserts a position that seemingly promotes social movement as first and foremost. He writes that pedagogical activities were conducted “in the service of the movements’ progressive, radical, or revolutionary goals” (p. 324) and are “explicitly oriented toward serving the needs of specific sectors of society” (p. 353). The irony in Holst’s writing is that while he seeks to advocate for the underprivileged, he assumes that the desires of the individual are and should be, not for the individual, but for the collaborative. Although I would agree that prevailing neoliberal perspectives create a disjointed, competitive culture at the expense of self-fulfillment, I am not sure that movement-centered education adequately addresses the needs of the individual either. Nonetheless, Holst’s view is useful in presenting an alternate to neoliberalism that is firstly participatory in nature and secondly has already proven itself in helping individuals achieve a better quality of life.
