EUREDA

A Glossary for Adult Learning in Europe

A Glossary for Adult Learning in Europe

1. Why a glossary

A glossary, regardless of which discipline it relates to, constitutes a tool linked to a precise historical period or a current of thought. This is particularly true for adult education. The fact that the first terminologies of the seventies are used today in compiling encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and glossaries is a sign of the times. In all the member-states of the European Union, adult education is leaving behind its image as an underestimated sector, under the care of well meaning people.

Whether it be in the area of research or politics, this is becoming the subject of rapid evolution the dynamics of which are difficult to keep up with.

This glossary has been compiled because the creation of a common Europe requires it; because today as well, there are policies and measures in the field of adult learning. Because new subjects, institutions, social partners, social movements are appearing on the scene with new awareness and new competencies. Because politics, practice, thought and research have renewed modern definitions in our field of work with as a consequence the invention of a new terminology.

In this sense, our glossary, has been updated to give the reader a better understanding without, however, any pretence of homogenising the current terminological Babel.

2. Selected key words

A glossary should be a dynamic tool, updated on a daily basis, extended following the emergence of new words and changes of meaning to those already in use.

For this reason, apart from the paper version, we assign the taste of disseminating of the glossary to the WWW and the virtual community of the EAEA and ask users to communicate with those responsible for the site, to send their comments on various terms and to communicate any missing information, together with their descriptions.

This first version contains more than 150 key words and, in most cases, includes syntagmata and chains of words. It refers to too few definitions to claim to be able to cover the entire field and all national idiosyncrasies. This was, however, not its intention. The objective is to offer a tool that is easy to use and which can provide a choice of the most frequent and significant terms. Here, the reader is able to find a selection that, of course, takes into account various nationalities, but also, at the same time, offers essential key words in order to understand the diverse aspects of adult education in Europe. Moreover, we have also endeavoured to include those terms that reflect the most advanced practice and contemporary ideas on adult education.

In some cases, we have included several descriptions of one term or concept. This can be found in cases in which:

Slight semantic differences in use exist for the same term in different countries or cultural areas, whether they arise from different approaches in accordance with varying schools of thought on the description of the general concept or whether they are retained when they pertain to the presentation of a concrete case which refers to a specific national reality.

Where the distribution of the key words relating to the diverse cultural and linguistic areas is concerned, our starting point has been the observation that a common language does not yet exist. This can be observed across a limited range of subjects, while its essential parts, meanings and common traits cannot immediately be detected. This brings with it two provisos with respect to a project like ours.

In the first place, it is necessary to gather, as De Saussure would say, the entirety of linguistic signs, of acoustic images and concepts used in different linguistic cultural and political areas.

In the second place (again in De Saussure’s words), where syntagmata and groups of words linked to associative relationships are concerned, translation into another language constitutes an arduous competency and results in distortions. We should, in fact, bear in mind that the relationship between words and concepts is the most varied from the time when the following instances are encountered:

• The absence of corresponding words and concepts in another language
• The presence of corresponding words (literal translation), but the absence or diversity of the concepts (this is the most dangerous and varying case)
• The presence of corresponding concepts, but the use of various words or syntagmata (in these cases, literal translation becomes distorted)

Those observations have given our project a series of choices, which we will briefly elaborate on:

The key words cover a lexicon used in twenty other European countries

Selection: Forty experts of different nationalities have been entrusted with this task and where necessary, the key word has not been translated from the original language

In most cases, we have referenced the country the description has come from and we have only omitted such a reference in some cases. However, this has only been done in those cases where the key word has been inherited by both languages (at least in European Union countries).

3. Use

The key words contained in the glossary belong to the following categories:

• Theory
• Strategy and Policy
• System
• Organisations and Providers
• Programmes, Methods
• Public
• Adult Learning Operators

These have been categorised according to a recently developed structure for our evaluation. We must in fact remember that this glossary does not only constitute a consultation tool, but can also be viewed as summarised knowledge capable of providing information on some fundamental issues in this field of work and discipline.

Nevertheless, in order to enable rapid and accurate consultation, we have also inserted an alphabetical index of key words contained in the glossary and of a associated terms (in common use today), the scope of which is to facilitate the use of the glossary.

4. The glossary’s theoretical and historical references

A definition of the field

The expression "adult education" - in this instance - refers to the phenomenon deriving from the entirety of theories, strategies, policies and organisational models which aim to interpret, direct and manage the individual and collective training processes throughout their entire existence. The objective of adult education goes beyond the boundaries of the school system and of professional training. It includes the entirety of learning activities, including those of an informal or accidental nature, present in work and every day life.

Historical origins

Adult education, in the modern sense, as an organised and intentional process which is becoming increasingly interesting to people from every population level throughout their entire life-spans, became a reality with the advent of industrial society. In fact the first state provisions in favour of adult education came into existence in Norway during the first half of the 18th century. The end of the first half of the 19th century saw the beginning of the first historical studies on adult education in the United Kingdom, a practice which had already been exported overseas well before the independence of America, where a legislative transfer came into effect towards the end of the Elizabethan era. Spain, like other European Mediterranean countries, had to wait until the 19th century to see its introduction.

Adult education truly established itself during the most intense period of the industrial revolution. It came into existence through two parallel movements; on the one hand, the industrial bourgeoisie’s interest in having available manual labour capable of participating in a productive activity undergoing constant development and, on the other hand, the emerging working class’s interest in directing the new conditions and training possibilities brought about by the production process, and in its own emancipation and interest in overcoming the social divisions of labour. To these two movements, a third developing trend can be added, brought about by the emerging social classes, which united around the process of creation of new states and the tendencies to have recourse to training as a means to achieve national unification and the reinforcement of the governing classes.

At the turn of the 18th and 19th century, in all the countries of industrialised Europe, this was translated into the rise of newly founded schools and professional training centres for adults or young workers (from revolutionary courses promoted in Paris for gunsmith teachers in year two under the Montagnard convention to agricultural schools promoted by Marquis Ridolfi during the first decades of the 19th century, to the evening and Sunday classes for female workers in Massachusetts promoted by the textile company Lowell & Waltham from the beginning of 1820 onwards, to the schools founded by the large German arms company, Krupp), the expansion of forms of educational friendly societies and solidarities (in practice in Italy, as in other European countries, through the mutual aid societies or the Chambers of Labour) and the birth of educational systems and activities inspired by the working class, as in Denmark and in all the other Scandinavian countries, to the principles of the definitive folkeoplysning of the Protestant Bishop Grundtvig and of his disciples.

Towards the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, public intervention first appeared in an indirect way and then through direct management, including the area of lifelong education. These interventions were chiefly aimed at controlling and managing educational and professional training organisations for youth and adults.

The eruption of the two world wars had, in a sense, a stagnating effect on the development of training practices and policies which was intensified by the establishment of dictatorial governments. It was, however, precisely during those years immediately after the first world war, in 1919, that for the first time the expression "lifelong education" was accepted in an official British government document. Just one year earlier, also in the legislation of the emerging Soviet Union, the aim to "guarantee to the workers effective access to knowledge" and the task of "assuring the manual workers and the peasants of complete, universal and free education" was affirmed.

During the 1930’s in Western Europe, however, the modern concept of adult education went through a crucial period of fine-tuning of theory and practice in the historical experience of the popular front in France. It was in the framework of this political movement against nazi-fascism that intellectuals came into contact with the working class and that the idea of mental training, in the form of éducation populaire, through which the working class’s mental musculature was strengthened, enabling them to respond to "ideas received", challenged the practice of transmitting culturally predetermined content and values. These are the presuppositions which provided the route to the idea of éducation permanente, put forward by Arents and Lengrand in the 1950s, completely free of any hypothesis on "cultural continuation" or on "permanent education" and directly connected to our initial definition.

From the 1960s onwards, the field of education entered a phase of constant growth and became the object of unceasing confrontation by various interested parties. The model which focused on school as an essential period in the education of a person, concentrated in one single phase during an individual’s life, entered a crisis period. On the other hand, the explosion of the demand for training by both the individual as well as an economic system increasingly based on the content of product knowledge prompted the beginning of an intense reform process and of new political interventions aimed at creating new training conditions and systems. Governments, entrepreneurs, unions and social organisations viewed training in the context of their plans for economic and social policies, policies on employment, health, etc. Social movements and unions put forward new claims on the specific grounds of education on a global level. In all countries the right of access to education and culture became a common motive from the beginning of the 1960s onwards. In 1974 the International Labour Office approved Convention no. 140 which aimed to introduce employees’ rights to free time for training through paid study permits on a global scale. From then on, government actions intensified, particularly in the more industrialised countries. Already prior to Berkeley’s student uprising of 1968, the American president, Johnson, created a vast programme promoted by the federal government for professional refresher course and basic adult education. It was Sweden, under the initiative of its Prime Minister Olof Palme, the first country to put a recurring educational system into use in 1968 with the aim of making it possible to return to education on a large scale. Despite the difficulties, the crisis in the fiscal policies and the Welfare State, such initiatives were continued during the 1980s and ‘90s and not only in Northern Europe, but in all the developed countries of the world, such as the USA, Australia or Canada. In Japan, it reached more decisive levels than elsewhere when, from 1990 onwards, a reform of the entire educational system took place in the form of lifelong learning, based on the integration of various development opportunities of a mainly non-school nature.

The influence of currents of ideas

Of course, considerable variations in terminology and definitions can be traced back to their use in the various currents of ideas present in the field of adult education.

As far as the definition of the scope of continuing education is concerned, the rich variety of approaches can be traced back to two principal paradigms: the neo-liberal and the critical-radical.

With the neo-liberal approach, adult education is used for its complementary function with respect to predetermined goals: to achieve people’s agreement on beliefs and communal values and to assure the availability of adequately trained human resources. The context, in other words, is presumed to be accepted and adult education is viewed as a means of enabling the individual to contribute to and participate in its progress.

Training is seen as a largely individual process. It is not by chance that it is identified with learning, viewed, above all, to be of a psychological nature. As a consequence, the organisations which create learning conditions, contextual elements, placed so as to make training possible are not included.

In the neo-liberal approach, reference to educational context is vague (such as e.g. in Knowles), both where the concepts of educational equality and characterisation are concerned. Equality of opportunities is considered to be the communal starting point for everyone, connected to family and school. Successively, education has the task of giving everyone the place in society which they deserve best. A system of sanctions and rewards serves this end and creates differences that are considered inevitable. The result is the responsibility of the individual.

With the critical-radical approach, lifelong education is considered to be a means of control and of renewal of the dominant production relationships. Lifelong education consequently aims at forming an alliance with the entirety of economic, political, social and cultural aspects which form part of individual and communal life.

Here, education is identified with the liberating strategies and movements which lead to control and social management of the educational processes. The specific function, the raison d’être, of lifelong education is identified with the educational process and the action which causes "human agents" to transform the social conditions which impede their intellectual development. Some authors, whether they be European or North American, inspired by Gramsci and Freire, succeed in identifying lifelong education with "anti-hegemonic education", or in other words with the action which, contemporaneously, produces structural changes and creates new values, expectations, identities and solidarities in the same subjects. Interest in the interactive dimension and the dimension which transforms educational processes and interest in hegemonic competencies is answered by underlining the collective dimensions of the movements. From here on, education continues as an integral part of the action of every type of social movement (manual workers, women, elderly, indigent, etc.).

The theories on the learning process in adulthood

An ulterior source of influence on terminology and conceptual growth is provided by the theoretical reflection on the matter. The need to define a theory on the educational process during the different stages of life, and more generally during adulthood links up with the entirety of philosophical approaches to adult education. The need to provide scientific confirmation of the possibility of educating oneself throughout an entire life-span was first expressed in the first decades of the 20th century in the studies of Thorndike in the USA and of Vygostki in the Soviet Union. The main references to this were at first mostly centred around the operation of the intellect in adulthood, while subsequent references tended to focus on the connections between individual and cultural development. It is on such a connection that the Dewey school approach was based, which - particularly through the work of Eduard Lindeman - identifies life with education ("all of life is learning, for this reason, education can have no end") and defines education as a collective and social phenomenon. The successive developments of physiological and neurological sciences (on neuroplasticity of the brain and on the modifiability of the structure and physiology of neurons) led to definitive confirmation regarding the continuous development of the capacity to learn during the course of adult life and its failure factors deriving from the subject’s physiological and social conditions which overcome the compensating effects of experience accumulated during life.

At the same time, the creation of specific theoretical models requires the contribution of research which bases the overcoming of a merely transferral approach to education on science. From this point of view, the development of the entirety of human sciences offers fundamental contributions. Aside from anthropology and sociology, another particular contribution comes from psychology.

Basing itself on research results in other disciplines, attempts at theoretical systemisation are being developed based on the specifications of the learning process during adulthood. At the risk of over-simplification, the principal theoretical directions can be reduced to two: the theories which have a tendency to explain the learning processes in function of the internal structure of the person and of the individual adult as a student and the theories which aim to explain the learning process in its individual and collective complexity, in other words, the critical theories.

The theories of adult learning developed principally as a result of psychological research. Human psychology (Mazlow, Rogers, Perls) is the particular branch of psychology upon which the creation of Knowles’ model is based. This attempt to systematise sets from the presupposition that all human beings, by reason of their psychological make-up, are "destined" to realise themselves and to continuously develop their potential.

Adult education is thus defined as a facilitation process aimed at providing support in the ability to direct and develop oneself, an ability which individuals naturally possess. On this basis, Knowles elaborated a series of training methods to ensure a correct negotiation between teacher and student of the learning objectives, methodical management and the training assessment.

Critical theories tend to have an interdisciplinary approach. They set out from the acknowledgement of the existing negative nature of education, i.e. the product of historical movements, educational ability reports and relationships between the micro and macro dimensions and between the individual and the social system. Lifelong learning is then understood in terms of a shaping process which develops with time, precisely, and which "corresponds, in its development, with the learning process, understood, not only for its individual value, but also for the cultural and social value". Education can be identified with the action of the individual and collective subject, or the historical subject, aimed at transforming itself and the social context through which it is determined and removing the causes which have generated the need for learning. This is expressed with particular determination in Paulo Freire’s consciousness-raising theory. For Freire, the objective of the person in learning consists in understanding the way in which the social structures have influenced his way of thinking, during development, a self-identification process which helps him recognise his own power and the world itself (1971). The consciousness-raising theory is the result of a combination of actions and observations completed in free and autonomous learning conditions. In Freire, the transforming dimension of learning is perceived as the means of realising a society which respects man’s dignity and freedom. Developing actions and "the protagonist action of the person who is his own spokesperson for the problem which is to be resolved scientifically" (Orefice) find their own combination in engaging in participative research into the knowledge production system used by people in their everyday struggle for survival. It examines an approach to knowledge production which recovers and refines people’s capacity to conduct their own research; it favours the appropriation of knowledge created by dominant systems; it develops the necessary knowledge for its own emancipation process and enables people to free themselves from control and the hegemony of the elite (Tandom, 10-11). Analogous characteristics can be attributed to biografia educativa, in which "personal power in order to define one’s own educational life history is extremely enlightening and implicit. This exercise contributes to the creation of self-education while defining the concept") (Pineau, 1980; Demetrio, 1996)

The organisation and the national systems

Similar considerations can be applied to the systems and organisations for adult education in the different countries of the European Union. Here, as we move into the area of subjects, we should take into account the imprecision of each attempt to compare so as not to level out the existing differences and try to avoid the risk of assessing their extent using concepts pertaining to adult education culture. It is not by chance that the comparative analyses which have been published to date, limit themselves to describing national cases, and in general to a comparison which does not cover more than the two main formal and informal educational systems, given that the secondary elements result in difficult comparisons.

Considering the profound diversity, this study proposes to reconstruct the ways in which the diverse national adult education systems are structured today, in particular with the aim of focusing on analogies and characteristics.

The general system, as a norm, can be divided into four distinctive principal areas according to their nature:

• formal, or linked to the degree of the holder of a diploma or certificate
• non-formal, corresponding to organised educational institutions, but not tending to issue certificates;
• informal, identifiable in the educational processes which are not organised or structured and are managed on either an individual or social level;
• accidental, connected to the educational processes which arise accidentally in every-day working life.

These categories, formalised by UNESCO in 1970, though in use prior to this, whether it be in the field of science (from Dewey onwards) or politics (the World Bank for example), when aiding the categorising of the complexity of educational processes, began to reveal their limits, however, at the time when lifelong education started to refer to the new knowledge classification (the French philosopher, Michel Serres’ tree of knowledge) and to the transversal concept of competence. The new epistemological approaches linked well with the typical direction of lifelong learning and faced legalisation and certification of every type of knowledge and the reduction of the burden of formal education. In this new context, emphasis is put on the integration between the various fields rather than their separation.

As a consequence, the description of the system which ensures its implementation should rather refer to the chief elements of the organisation of lifelong education (the services, the infrastructure, the agencies, the companies, the legislative and administrative measures). Moreover, it is necessarily limited to the specialised factory, becoming concrete during the course of historical events, which supports the entirety of diverse organised training models.

The services relating to lifelong education constitute a recently developed field connected to new policies. The reduction of the direct business management role relating to state systems has increased the importance of the creation of a series of basic services for the public (e.g. information systems, orientation systems, consulting and motivational systems), for companies (analysis of business training needs, how to set up a company and increase business, etc.), for specialised organisations (documentation, training of workers, valuation, inspection, financial and organisational consultation, quality control).

Educational and cultural infrastructures (libraries, theatres, databases, museums, etc.) are the object of a change which is calling for undoing not only the conserving role but also that of lifelong education throughout the different levels of the population. This change is developing on four levels: the modification of the production distribution method (e.g. the new forms of home loans of artwork, or the "star" distribution process of magazines for hairdressing salons - in use by several Italian libraries, etc.); the collaboration with other agencies (between libraries and factories, museums and hospitals, etc.), the reform in an educational sense of the internal operating procedures (opening hours, work acquisition criteria, personnel competencies, etc.); the support in the form of the public’s expression and artistic production (relationship between the author and the public, availability of tools of expression, etc.)

The agencies operating in the sector have seen an enormous development in quality and quantity. The typology of the systems differs from country to country. In Europe, where functions are concerned, six different types of departments can be distinguished:

• those with a planning and programming function
• those with a federal function
• those which provide basic general services
• those which are specialised (for the public, geographical areas, problems, subject matter, methods or objectives)
• poli-functional
• non-specialised

Businesses are developing in all areas of knowledge, through an infinite variety of methods (from courses to practical experience, to participatory research, to work groups or labs, etc.) involving problems in relation to the entire life-span (from entrepreneurial questions to making preparations for the end of one’s life). From a typology proposed by Abrahamson, it is possible to subdivide the field into the following areas with regard to education:

• the completion of compulsory education
• the return to school education (from basic adult education to university)
• the reinforcement of the usability of the subjects
• the development of general competencies in both paid and unpaid work
• updating in-service
• the transformation in an educational sense of every type of organisation
• independent learning
• the development of society in general

Legislative and managerial measures determine the operational principles of the system, help determine the distributive rules for access to education and the role of various subjects in the education process management and with respect to the use of training benefits. The welfare crisis has had no effect on the legislative production, which has instead experienced progressive growth across the world from 1970 onwards. The government’s means increased and there was an orientation towards "programmatic documents", "option plans" which - more so than laws - allowed more frequent updating. The legislative measures can be categorised under two principle types:

1. non-specific, in other words, geared towards detailing and regulating the educational dimensions of interventions and circumstances which are not strictly educational (industrial or agricultural policies, health, social policies, etc.).
2. specific, in other words, geared towards determining choices, management rules and possible administrative and financial norms of the educational system in the above mentioned components (services, infrastructures, agents, businesses).

The study will not take the dimensions of these systems into consideration, even if we must take into consideration that the resources and constant legislative production risk render obsolete a study which adheres too strictly to present reality and will not attempt to take the path of creating descriptive and significant typologies accurately.

A Glossary for Adult Learning in Europe