Perspectives on our Practice
by L. Glenn Smith
Northern Illinois University
My agenda is to understand the field of adult education and the emerging climate in which theory and practice exist. The following convictions reflect my current understandings: 1) There is nearly unanimous argument that the field emerged in the United States in the 1920's with the beginnings of a national society devoted to adult education. 2) Underlying premises were socially democratic, politically progressive, philosophically pragmatic. (Eduard Lindeman is metaphysically, epistemologically, and axiologically indistinguishable from John Dewey; the birth of the USSR and the appearance of the New Deal came just as AE was launching; hope for social improvement through enlightened government was a hallmark of a pragmatic field in a pragmatic time.) It could only have happened in such an atmosphere, but now--seventy years or two generations later--the context is radically different: No one reads Dewey or Lindeman; the Soviet Union is gone; the New Deal is a phrase in school history books; enlightened government is an oxymoron--and I am answering questions about the strengths and challenges of the Northern Illinois University ACE graduate programs, wishing for a noveau New Deal.
While not stated explicitly, the questions we are to address imply answers within a university setting. With that in mind, my answers are framed in three convictions: 1) universities came into being as part of the emergence of the nation state; 2) no matter how "independent" they assert themselves as being, even Harvard and Oxbridge are arms of the state, whether training officers for war or executives for the economy; and 3) what we call Liberal Arts and Sciences at NIU have always dominated universities. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth, arts and sciences faculties have forced "professional" areas such as law, medicine, theology and education to join the corporation as a way of enforcing a monopoly in the knowledge trade. There's more: Evidence is building that the age of the nation state is over. For the last five centuries, nation states have had effective monopolies on violence and information flow. The apparent success of Desert Storm notwithstanding, no nation state can now sustain such a claim. This is more than rhetoric; it's the harbinger of profound change. It means many things, not the least of which is that universities as we've known them are in irreparable decline. The University of Phoenix and the Fielding Institute are much more the wave of the future than, say, the UCLA or the University of Oklahoma.
Among the implications: 1) Adult educators should pause before betting everything on traditional universities; perhaps a foothold in a structure outside the university (and outside the United States' jurisdiction) would be a prudent hedge. 2) Coming to terms with wireless, encrypted, personal data transmission and receiving devices--a powerful lap top or palm size computer with a cell phone or uplink capability--is critical. The new elite are the persons with access to such technology and the skills to use them. Everyone else is illiterate.
Should our community outreach include a short course in off shore telecommunication-banking offered to, say, the Maniac Latin Disciples? Or perhaps they can offer the workshop to us. One thing that's for sure. If they aren't already using e-cash to buy Swiss francs, they will be before the IRS gets is computer programs purged of the "millennium bug"--the 00 code problem that is only two years away from causing system meltdown.
All this Buck Rogers talk may have some of you wondering if it's too late to send me back to the foundations faculty. I'll go quietly, if that's your wish. Otherwise, I invite you to join me in thinking of alternatives: To a pragmatic field with an increasingly existential and idealistic clientele. To a set of traditions that depend on federal intervention--in a time when bureaucrats are often part of the problem. To telling our co-learners that "adults learn differently than children" when they ask how to arrange effective learning environments. To five chapter dissertation designs when quasi experiments are nowhere in sight. What are the key strengths? The large, diverse faculty. The most significant challenge? The large, diverse faculty. It all turns for me whether I can stay an active adult learner. Because I don't think any of us knows the answers. We probably don't know the questions.
Part of my new learning is in the arena of art. For the past two years I've been seriously pursuing an expansion of awareness by studying photography as a way of seeing. It's about possibilities. And that takes discipline. I've brought a couple of examples for the show and tell part of the program. The first is called "Psychic Memories." Its inscription reads: "Was this soon-to-be doctor at home in ancient Africa? Will she and her skills be celebrated in 21st century America? Has her cosmic struggle moved her beyond her complacent contemporaries?" The other is entitled "Artist's Dilemma: Truth or Knowledge?" I've appended a quotation from a noted mystic: "Either you can become identified with what you have known, or you can become a witness to it. If you're identified with it, then you and your memory become one. But if there is no identification--if you have remained aloof from your memories, separate, not identified with them--then you are aware of yourself as something different from your memories. This awareness becomes a path toward the unknown..." (Osho, The Inward Revolution).
This presentation was published in Scholarship through Dialogue, a newsletter for the Commission of Professors of Adult Education, 1:2 (September 1997).
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Contact: thea@chicago1.nl.edu
Entered: 22 October 1997
