Edukacja dorosłych i lifelong learning między systemem a światem życia. Interwencje krytyczne
Adult Education and Lifelong Learning Between System and Lifeworld. Critical Interventions

Summary/Abstract: The reckless promotion of competency-based education and training and theimposition of regulatory curriculum standards go hand in hand with similar attitudesamong adult education scholars and experts who increasingly back off from envisagingadult learning as an area of human interaction where pedagogy finds its humanisticmeaning and significance and where communicative rationality can be enacted andtaught. Out of three basic interests of human knowledge and cognition – technical,practical and critical – adult education of our time tends to opt for realising only thetechnical one. This is due to the colonisation of the lifeworld by the imperatives ofthe system (Habermas) which remains blind to a human interest in self-formation,autonomy, emancipation, and gaining critical awareness. As the lifeworld system iscolonised, there emerge autonomous subsystems, such as global economies, markets,media, and business corporations. Operating relatively independently of state anddemocratic control, they impose instrumental rationality in sectors of key importancefor viable democracy and subject education to its interests and standards. Through theuse of manifold technologies of micro-power (Foucault), people are now “condemnedto learn” – only to make profits, if not to subsist in uncertain times.

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