Comprehensive surveys of adult education: A recipe for ossifying provision?

Abstract

This paper cautions against uncritically enthusiastic calls for comprehensive national surveys of adult education provision and participation in Australia. It is argued that the socially essential characteristics of adult education–its diversity, flexibility and responsiveness–are threatened by such surveys. To adequately plan, implement and report a comprehensive national survey, adult education must be highly standardised and categorised. This structuring of the field may conflict with the maintenance of that flexibility and responsiveness which allows adult education to fulfil its social mission in a liberal and pluralistic representative democracy (such as that in Australia). A comprehensive national survey, if successful, may be expected to exert formalising and conservative (of regressive) influences on the field. Under such influences, the field of adult education may become increasingly socially dysfunctional. This could lead in time to the creation of alternative forms of education outside the defined realm of adult education.