Adult and permanent education in times of crisis: A critical perspective based on Freire and Gelpi

Abstract

Besides other theoretical perspectives, the understanding of present adult education and learning policy discourse also demands contributions from social enquiry originated in the broader field of permanent education. The works of Paulo Freire and Ettore Gelpi, two of the most important authors who developed a critical perspective of permanent education may provide valuable resources for understanding what adult education has to offer in educating our way out of the current crisis. Both authors developed political pedagogies and dialectical approaches, which are central to critical studies. Inspired by the works of Freire and of Gelpi, this paper challenges the perspectives which argue that welfare state intervention has been the main source of the education crisis, that the withdrawal of the state can be a way of reviving individual learning, that the training of competent and useful human resources represents a strategy for crisis management and the promotion of economic competitiveness. On the contrary, it concludes that adult education in the light of a critical concept of permanent education is a key to the understanding of the crisis, and to ‘educating’ the crisis – a metaphor that both in a Freirian and Gelpian perspective stresses the importance of culture, work and social struggles for the transformation of the social world.

Keywords:

• Adult education
• permanent education
• education crisis
• Paulo Freire
• Ettore Gelpi

Disclosure statement

The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Notes

Notes

1 See for different perspectives about this concept, Ball (2009) and Singh (2015).

2 According to Gelpi (2008, p. 52), ‘Reducing human beings to human resources leads to the destruction of some of these and of the human beings themselves’. That is why he insisted so much on the idea of cultural and political education for freedom (see Riccardi 2014).

3 He notes that, ‘[…] education is not just preparation for life but rather, and to an increasing extent, an integral part of human activity’ (Gelpi 2007, p. 152).

4 According to Pierre Bourdieu (2000, p. 39), the ‘work of symbolic inculcation’, or ‘imposition’, is based on certain presuppositions considered obvious, one of which is admitting ‘[…] that maximum growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness, are the ultimate and sole end of human action, or that it is impossible to resist economic forces’.

5 In this regard, Gelpi (2005, p. 82) wrote: ‘We must not separate education from the struggle of workers against their alienation. It is this connection between the educational, economic and political struggle which characterises participation in the working class movement within the field of education’.

6 According to Freire (1975b, p. 99), unlike ‘banking education’, which, ‘involves a sort of anaesthesia, annulling the students’ creative power, problem-posing education, of a genuinely reflexive nature, involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former aims to maintain immersion; the latter, on the contrary, strives for the emergence of consciousness, resulting in their critical intervention in reality.

7 According to Gelpi (2005, p. 229), ‘The “subversive” nature of permanent education not based on adaptation or drill, is the cause of the obstacles which prevent its practical application, as well as the interest it rouses among those who wish to transform society’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under Project PEst-OE/CED/UI1661/2014.