Adult Education and Literacy

Approaches

Several theories and philosophies guide adult education and literacy. This entry focuses on two well-known and distinctively opposed approaches: technicist-vocational and popular liberating education. The technicist-vocational approach targets mostly working class adults and stresses a utilitarian approach in which the learner gains essential knowledge and skills in reading, writing, and computation for effective functioning in society. The main concern is to help the participants fit into the existing socioeconomic structure, particularly jobs at the lower end of the economy.

The alternative approach to technical and functional adult education and literacy is adult popular education for social transformation. This approach, typified in the work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, is aimed at enhancing human potential and [Page 19]dignity while working for a better world—that is, a more humane, just, equitable, and sustainable society. Adult education as popular education for social transformation is built upon a critique of the technicist functional approach, and looks toward expanding and enriching the narrow view of the latter.

The focus of this type of popular education is the poor, oppressed, and disenfranchised. Freire and Donaldo Macedo define literacy as “reading the word and the world.” Accordingly, adult literacy takes place by adults reading and writing their own reality. From these theorists' perspective, no one is completely illiterate, and no one is completely literate. The popular knowledge coming from people's daily lives and experiences is valued and used, as well as challenged. Adults study not only what their reality is but also how this reality should and can be transformed. In doing so, they embrace education as a tool for their own empowerment.

Adult Education for Social Transformation

Education for social transformation involves a language of critique or denunciation, and a language of possibility or annunciation. Freire argues that all education is political and that participants in the educational process should be tactically inside and strategically outside the system. According to him, adult learners need to demystify the reality constructed for them through the mainstream media by those in power. The adult education curricula should be built with the participants by using their own experiences and realities to help them understand whose “reality” is constructed through the media, including textbooks. In addition to learning basic skills, they should be made aware of how public consent is manufactured. As citizens who contribute to the transformation of the world, adult learners should not merely learn basic skills but should focus on understanding the world so that they can contest hegemonic social practices and systems. In Freire's model of education, adult educators assist learners in unveiling the everyday taken-for-granted realities and prejudices that result in oppressive practices and inequity.