Neither Adult nor Education
HAAG, ERNEST VAN DEN
Neither Adult nor Education UNIVERSITY ADULT EDUCATION By Renee and William Petersen Harper. 288 pp. $5.50. Reviewed by ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG Professor of Social Philosophy, New York...
...These theorists are woolly enough to compare with any flock...
...Many of the theorists themselves don't want anything to do with education, which, as the Petersens point out, does not seem to attract the best personnel and offers little money or prestige...
...author, "Education as an Industry" Much has been written and little is known about adult education...
...Some fancy themselves cut-rate psychotherapists...
...Perhaps some sociologist will be stirred into studying them, now that the educators have been thoroughly surveyed in this book...
...We know too little about the students that are being and could be attracted...
...It will be indispensable to students of the subject...
...Yet they want to imitate it in education, where it certainly does not belong for the simple reason that education rests on the premise that some people know more than others and therefore are qualified to be teachers...
...Nor have the theoreticians ever investigated how educational "needs" come to be "felt...
...Here, finally, is a book that covers all the basic facts and theories in clear and well ordered form...
...Some maintain that "group dynamics" is everything, students should learn from each other and, most important, teachers should not teach...
...Now that the Petersens have made this excellent survey of what adult educators do, or think they do, we might turn our attention to the students...
...Theories are then fashioned to explain that it is best to keep the adult student around (you have to, after all...
...We are advised that overeating is a greater threat to health in the United States than starvation, that people buy as much as they do only because of advertising, that economic theory is obsolete, that better education costs more, etc...
...Others may be really in need of some form of therapy...
...But the consumer, in this case, often does not really want to be educated...
...And he isn't...
...It explains, for example, why adult education is so seldom adult and so rarely education...
...They don't teach...
...Perhaps we can make both available, but there is no reason in the world to give one instead of the other—and, in the confusion, achieve the aims of neither...
...This may be good citizenship or bad, but it isn't education...
...Many adults may be able to benefit from disciplined education...
...In therapy one does not instruct...
...Their first chapter, which attempts a general setting, offers a potpourri of silly and often false cliches...
...Others feel that "democracy" requires the subject matter to follow the students' "felt needs," whether for Plato or ice skating, rather than the faculty's view of what can and should be taught...
...And it is—who would ever have expected it?—actually fun to read...
...Must instructors then abdicate their responsibility to TV personalities, journalists or advertising men...
...they indoctrinate and mobilize for causes—from supporting the United Nations to getting out the vote...
...Unhappily, the Petersens put their left and worst foot forward...
...The super-democrats usually are very suspicious of the economic free market which produces according to the felt needs of paying customers...
...Instead, there is group discussion or an attempt at satisfaction of "felt needs...
...but one does not call it adult education, either...
...Thus colleges are more subject-oriented while adult education is altogether consumeroriented...
...or, you need the money) and to keep him happy by avoiding education...
...Could it be through viewing a television program or reading the newspaper...
...Reviewed by ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG Professor of Social Philosophy, New York University...
...Others see themselves as social reformers...
...This confusion of democracy with absence of leadership (more precisely, with the shift from expert and acknowledged to inexpert and unacknowledged leadership) explains a lot...
...But after this ritualistic bow to fashionable journalism disguised as scholarship, the authors give adult education an acute, factual and balanced goingover, free from cliches and rhetoric except when they quote, usually tongue in cheek, adult education theorists...
...Adult—as well as primary and secondary—teaching is in a greater state of confusion than college teaching because school boards are compelled, and adult educators impelled, to take all comers, whereas colleges are not...
Vol. 44 • November 1961 • No. 38
