Chapter one

Sociological Introduction

The education of adults is no new phenomenon: it has existed for centuries in one form or another. The Greeks separated education from training and trained their children for their place in the wider society but enabled their adults, who were leisured enough, to be educated. Hence, the education of adults was not new in that society and education itself was a phenomenon that would have been open to the considerations of the social analyst. Indeed, there is a sense in which Plato actually performed that, function, although obviously his analysis formed the basis of the philosophy of education rather than a sociology of education. Many centuries were to elapse before that was to appear. However, over that period the education of adults has continued and as more studies in this discipline appeared they have been embedded in psychology, in adult learning and in designing programmes for adult learners. Clearly there are many reasons why emphasis has been placed upon these areas, such as the fact that it had traditionally been assumed that intelligence declined in adulthood. Hence myths of this nature had to be laid to rest.

More recently, it has been recognised that the education of adults might be an instrument in social change; Gramsci (see Entwistle 1979), for instance, thought that worker education could help destroy the cultural hegemony of the dominant social classes in Italy and, since the Second World War, the education of adults has been viewed as an instrument for the development of Third World countries, by organizations such as UNESCO. Additionally, it has been recognised that adult education serves other functions in society, such as a leisure function (Parker 1976).

Despite its long history, no sociology of the education of adults exists in the same manner as there are sociological studies of initial education. Indeed, throughout this study recourse will be made to some of the insights in these analyses and their findings will be examined in the context of the education of adults. Thompson’s (1980) symposium was one of the first attempts to produce a genuine sociological analysis of adult education but for a variety of reasons it was not received with tremendous enthusiasm by adult educators in the United Kingdom. Reviewers (Legge 1980, Stock 1981), while welcoming it, were critical for a variety of reasons including the fact that many of its contributors were university academics, it had a limited perception of adult education and the papers were of variable quality. However, one other major reason exists and this may be because it adopted a critical sociological perspective with a radical ideological approach. By contrast, Cunningham (1983:257) in America welcomed it as a ‘breath of fresh air’. She was also aware of the book’s deficiencies which exhibited no suspicion about the writers nor their perspectives.

Since the publication of that symposium there has been no systematic attempt to analyse the education of adults from the perspective of the social theorist, although there have been a number of studies published, some of which continues the debate that Thompson’s book started. Thomas (1982), for instance, examines radical adult educators and shows the strategies that have been adopted to ensure that their ideas have not found wider audiences than they have. Since he is also interested in comparative adult education he has included in his study reference to what he regards as an institutionalised form of radical adult education, the Danish Folk High School, but in this sense Thomas ceased to deal with a politically radical form of education, so that while his study adds to the sociological literature it does not fall into the category of a systematic sociological analysis of the education of adults. Indeed, that was not the author’s intention. Consequently, a gap still exists in the literature about adult and continuing education and the intention of this present study is to attempt to fill the void.

One of the reasons why no study of the education of adults has been undertaken from this perspective is the difficulty in deciding precisely what is the phenomenon under consideration.

McCullough (1980:158) nicely summarises this problem:

He concludes in the affirmative in response to this last question but many of the others remain unanswered. However, two things he (1980:159) is sure about, that adult education has an ‘organization and a purpose that can be structurally analyzed’. However, these conclusions and the questions raised in the long quotation merely reflect the complex issues that Peters and his associates (1980) were grappling with in this American study of adult education. The various contributors to this study clearly differed in their views about whether their lack of coherent structure was a good or a bad thing for adult education: Knowles (1980a:39) appears to consider that it gives flexibility to it to respond to whatever social needs arose while Griffith (1980:74) considers that this is a weakness because it inhibits planned co-ordination. However, the fact remains that the rich diversity of adult education makes it a difficult subject to study sociologically and this will be a recurrent theme throughout this text.

That something exists for the education of adults in a multitude of forms and organizations is undeniable, and as such constitutes a ‘social fact’, in Durkheim’s sense, that may be studied by the social analyst. However, sociological study of this diverse phenomenon is complicated by another factor; sociology itself is not a united discipline. Hence, no single sociological perpective exists which encourages a systematic study to be undertaken. Herein lies another major difficulty, since even if it were possible to determine the parameters of the education of adults, it is still necessary to recognise that any sociological perspective adopted may reflect only-one element of the discipline. Yet this does not mean that it is impossible to examine adult education from the social theorist’s perspective since, as McCullough points out, that it has both structures and processes. Significantly, but unsurprisingly, the differences between structures and processes reflect the differences between the major perspectives in social theory, so that before adult education is actually discussed it is necessary to clarify these different sociological schools of thought. Hence this chapter focuses both on the two different perspectives and, there-after, on schools of thought and ideologies, and concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the previous analysis for the study of adult and continuing education.

The Two Sociologies

The phrase ‘the two sociologies’ is the title of a well known paper by Dawe (1970) in which he argued that since sociology is concerned with both order and control in society two quite fundamentally different perspectives might be adopted. The first of these commences with the assumption that sociology is basically concerned with the problem of order and for society to exist at all social order must be imposed on individuals. Only when there is conformity to the rules of society can it actually exist and survive in time. The underlying point is that social order precedes the individual and if constraints are not imposed on persons then ‘man would run wild’ and chaos would reign. Social order consists of the boundary maintaining system, supported by and supporting the power structure of that society, so that its various elements are clearly demarcated. Boundary maintenance itself presupposes that the social system has some form of structure, i.e. certain properties that are independent of individuals (Giddens 1979:66).

One of the main criticisms of this approach is that man is regarded as nothing more than a reflection of the social order in which he has been socialized. He is no more than an automaton who has been enculturated into the social system, its values, meaning system, etc. and that all of his actions merely reflect that which has been imprinted upon him. If this were totally the case then ‘Brave New World’ would be a reality but, as it may be recalled, one of the concerns of that novel was with the non-conformist. This is a significant point since, as Wrong (1976:61–2) notes, there has been an intense concern among sociologists to construct an adequate theory of deviant behaviour. It was also Wrong (1961) who was among the first sociologists to criticise this approach to sociological analysis, suggesting that it resulted in an oversocialized conception of man. He recognised the validity of Freud’s insight, that man does not necessarily experience guilt when he does not conform to society’s norms, although he should if man were merely a reflex of the social system, but he often experiences it when he does conform. Hence, man must be more than merely a reflection of the social system. This does not, however, rule out the idea that man is socialized into the culture of his society, or else there would be little basis for social interaction but it does point to a much more sophisticated interpretation of that process. This will be referred to again in the section where human learning is analysed later in this text.

The notion of individuality is, therefore, one that is at the basis of the criticism of this approach to sociological analysis, so that it is the point at which Dawe’s other sociology’ may be examined. He suggests that the Enlightenment produced an intellectual realization that social institutions were man-made rather than divinely created. Hence, the key issue for other theorists has become that of autonomous man seeking to gain control over essentially man-made institutions. From this perspective, action constitutes attempts ‘to exert control over existing situations, relationships and institutions in such a way as to bring them into line with human constructions of their ideal meaning’. (Dawe, cited from Thompson and Tunstall 1972:547). It should be noted immediately that the phrase ‘ideal meaning’ opens up the whole issue of ideology, a point which will be discussed in the following section of this chapter and elsewhere in this book. In this approach the individual is regarded as an agent capable of making ‘casual interventions… in the on-going process of events-in-the-world.’ (Giddens 19 7 9:55). The social system is now regarded as the outcome of human action. The individual is free to act in this way although, as Goffman (1959) noted, the person usually manages to present himself in a way that he perceives to be acceptable to his fellow human beings. Hence, while he feels that he is free he is still constrained by his perception of others’ expectations of him, so that his approach is still open to the criticism that man is over-socialized (Wrong 1976:67), since man seeks conformity. The difference in the two approaches, according to Wrong, is that the former makes man appear to be all super-ego while the latter places the emphasis on the ego. Additionally, this approach tends to avoid the issues of power and structure.

Neither perspective, therefore, is beyond criticism: the strengths of the one tend to be the weaknesses of the other. Both approaches highlight some valid issues and yet in other ways they are in opposition to each other. Dawe summarises these differences thus:

Obviously man cannot escape from the fact that he exists in a society so that structure and agency must co-exist and they must necessarily be interdependent if the social system is to survive in time. Social theory, however, is confronted with the dilemma of synthesizing apparently opposing perspectives in order to account for social reality. Whatever approach is adopted, its weaknesses may be seen in the strengths of the opposing viewpoint, so that synthesis is important in the development of social theory (see Giddens 1979) but since both approaches highlight different aspects of society and different facets of the education of adults both will be utilised in the following pages. Yet these two broadly different perspectives do not exhaust the differences within social theory and it is now necessary to focus upon some of the other variations before proceeding to an analysis of adult and continuing education.

Socioloaical Schools of Thought and Ideologies

Not only has social theory two main approaches, each of these may be sub-divided into a number of different schools of thought which, in turn, may relate to varying ideological perspectives. It is necessary to understand these before analysing the education of adults and this section follows the structure of the previous one.

Structural approaches to analysis have emerged in a number of the social sciences. Levi-Strauss (1968:279 ) suggested that social structures are models of the patterns of social relationships that exist within a given social system. The system may be treated as the actual functioning of those relationships. Two major schools of thought have emerged from this; that which analyses society ‘as it is’ and that which regards what is as morally repugnant and in need of change. The former is structural functionalism, often simply termed functionalism, and the latter is marxism: functionalism is inherently conservative in its ideological perspective simply because the starting point of the analysis is society as it is perceived to be while the other offers an idealistic alternative to what is and so condemns it.

Functionalism, associated with the work of Talcott Parsons (1951), views society as a complex social system, one that has become even more complex since the level of technology has become more sophisticated. Change, when it occurs, is of a gradual, evolutionary nature but as the system is regarded as cohesive, with each of the elements in functional harmony with every other, any change in one variable will automatically cause the remainder of the system to re-adjust in order to re-establish the social equilibrium. Man is the product of this social system and its culture is transmitted to him so that new generations are integrated into the existing social system without too great a disruption to its functioning; in this way it ensures its survival and maintenance through time.

Clearly there are major weaknesses in the functionalist perspective and Cohen (1968:47–64) summarised these as logical, substantive and ideological. Logically, he points out that functionalism is teleological (a phenomenon’s existence is explained by asserting ‘that’ it is necessary to bring about some other consequence) and this is inherently unacceptable since it treats an effect as a cause. Additionally, it is an untestable theory which also inhibits comparison and generalization. Substantively, it over-emphasizes the harmonious interrelationship of parts of the social system and it is unable to explain either persistence or change. Finally, functionalism is inherently conservative ideologically. However, Cohen (1968:64–65), while agreeing that some of these criticisms are justly founded, points out that functional analysis may be part of a genuine sociological explanation.

These criticisms have resulted in structural functionalism losing its dominant place in sociological theory in recent years and two major sets of responses have emerged, both suggest different structures to society and one of them concentrates upon an ideological perspective as well. They are discussed separately here in order to illustrate the differences in their response.

The social system as elaborated by the functionalists tended to play down the significance of power and class. The marxist analysis of the social structure concentrates upon these neglected issues and has received considerable attention. From this viewpoint society is regarded as having a substructure, the economic institution, and a superstructure; the shape and direction of change of the former determining the shape and direction of change of the latter. Hence, those who own (or control?) the substructure (the bourgeoisie) are in a position to exercise power over the remainder of society (the proletariat); the former do so for their own ends and to their own economic gain. This power need not be exercised overtly for much of the influence of the bourgeoisie is built into the social system and consequently exercised covertly, e.g. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony (Entwistle 1979:12–23). However, since there is a conflict of interests between these two sections there will ultimately be, so it is claimed, a conflict between them. Social change is regarded as something that results from class conflict. As a result of the next period of conflict the capitalist structure of society will be destroyed, so marxism claims, and a classless society will be established.

Obviously such a theory has many critics. For instance, social change may and does occur as a result of factors other than class conflict but whether such change actually affects the power structure of society is a more questionable point. Theorist also regard the idea of classlessness as idealistic and impractical. The elite theorists (see Bottomore 1966) argued that no society could survive without a ruling elite. Some have criticised marxism on the grounds that it is too deterministic. Weber (1930) suggested that capitalism itself emerged as a result of the Calvinist ethic, while elsewhere he (1948) claimed that power resided in class, status and party, so that Marx’s analysis of power was too narrow. This latter point clearly suggests that there might not be one elite in society but several and that society’s several institutions all have their own elite. C. Wright Mills(1959), for instance, was unwilling to claim that American society had a ruling class as a result of his analysis of the power elite of three institutions. Hence, there has been some suggestion that society comprises a plurality of institutions, each pursuing its own interest and a delicate balance being achieved within a social equilibrium. Thus the claim is made that this type of society is more democratic than that implied by the marxist analysis.

Marxist analysis regards the social structure as constraining man in an unequal manner as a result of his position in the social structure. Since the structures favour the rich and powerful they deprive the underprivileged proletariat who are prevented from achieving their full human potential. Man is therefore a reflection of his position in the social structure and yet he has within him the potential to transcend that and realize that his consciousness of reality is false and determined by his class position. Pluralists also regard man as a result of the social processes that operate in society and see him as subject to certain constraints but in this instance these are less restrictive than those implied by the other structural analyses discussed in this section.

Functionalism, marxism and some form of pluralism are the three major structural forms that have been suggested by theorists of contemporary society. The first of these is regarded as being inherently conservative in its ideological orientation because it cannot account fully for social change. Ideology itself is a difficult term with a variety of meanings: Althusser (1972:262) suggests that it is ‘the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group’ while Harris (1968:22) uses it to imply a description of the world from a particular viewpoint. Hence, despite the connotation of the term it has a rather general meaning relating to the way that individuals or groups interpret aspects of social reality. A conservative ideology, therefore, is one that favours the retention of the status quo in society and resists change. By contrast, radicalism is a perspective that views the social structures as unjust and in need of change. Radicalism should not be equated with marxism, although marxism is undoubtedly radical, since it preceded marxism and embodies ideological perspectives of many other activist groups in the history of society. Radicalism is, however, an ideology of change and the means by which that change is achieved may vary but that is not particularly relevant to the present discussion. Marxism obviously embodies radical perspectives and suggests that conflict situation is necessary for its ends to be realized. Clearly radical perspectives are more likely to be embraced by those social groups whom Marx would have categroized as being members of the proletariat. By contrast, those who exercise power and are relatively free of the constraints of the structure that they impose upon others are unlikely to espouse such a position themselves. They are more likely to embrace a classical liberal ideology which views individuals as independent, free to pursue their own interests and consider that they are able to do this through the exercise of their own rational judgements. They are, therefore, unlikely to advocate radical changes in the social structure so that their liberalism may be viewed as having conservative outcomes in terms of political ideology. Liberalism is, coincidently, the ideological perspective that is likely to be associated with some of the non-structuralist perspectives in sociological analysis, so that further reference will be made to it. An approach similar to radicalism in that it embraces the idea that change might be beneficial is reformism: this is an ideology that may be associated in part with pluralism. Reformists see the individual as restrained by the social structures but relatively more free to pursue interests within the limits that the more open social structures allow. At the same time, individuals are not regarded as being totally independent, so that they may need help in identifying and articulating their interests.

Thus far in this section three interpretations of the social structure have resulted in the specification of four ideological perspectives and the following table summarises a possible relationship between them.

Having examined the structural analysis of society, it is now necessary to turn to Dawe’s ‘other sociology’ and to investigate those schools of thought that reflect social action theories. Three sets of perspectives are scrutinized here: symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology.

Symbolic interactionism has, it is claimed (Meltzer et al 1975:1), three basic premises: human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them; these meanings are a product of social action in human society; these meanings are handled and modified through an interpretative process that is used by each individual in dealing with the. signs that are encountered. This approach owes its origins to Mead (1934) whose central concern was the individual self which emerges as a result of interaction with significant others and is maintained by continued interaction with other people in a more generalised sense thereafter. Consequently the self is able to communicate with itself, reflect and even act against itself. Mead has provided a valuable set of ideas that help explain the human being and human action but it is ahistorical and not greatly concerned with the issues of structural analysis, which may be conceived as major weaknesses. Additionally, despite its emphasis on the self it tends to neglect psychological insights.

Mainly as a result of the work of Schutz (1972) and Berger and Luckmann (1967), phenomenology has played a significant part in sociological theory in recent years. Phenomenology derives from the work of Husserl, although its current concerns are a little removed from his original interests. Now it focuses upon how individuals construct reality for themselves and the social processes that enable that reality construction to be maintained. While each person has his own stock of knowledge and his own construction of reality, interaction is possible because there are sufficient aspects in common to enable communication to occur. It is this common element that enables taken-for-granted commonality to exist, as if it were objective. This viewpoint is criticised by Flew (1976) who claims that not only does it lead to a relativistic perspective but that it denies objective knowledge. Clearly, phenomenological perspectives may lead to relativism but only in regard to certain forms of knowledge, since it does not deny logical nor empirical knowledge. However, this approach does imply that social structures may be experienced and interpreted by individuals in different ways, and this allows for differing ideological perspectives to be combined with it. Hence, in the ‘new’ sociology of education there are scholars who combine both the insights of phenomenology with the ideology of radical Marxism and their works will be referred to later in this text.

Ethnomethodology is, according to its founder Garfinkel (1974:18), concerned with studying practical activities, commonsense knowledge and the practical organizations of reasoning. Since it is concerned with interaction as well, it is more than a sub-discipline of phenomenology, although Schultz’s work was also a major influence on Garfinkel. Douglas (1971:15) distinguishes between situational ethnomethodologists whose main concern is the negotiation of social order, often studied by the experimenter disrupting the social situation in order to expose the background assumptions and expectations of the actors, and linguistic ethnomethodologists who concentrate on the conventions of everyday speech. The aim of these forms of research appear to be to discover the universal practices which make possible the creation and maintenance of social order and social structure. However, their research findings have not added greatly to the body of sociological knowledge and ethnomethodology appears less significant currently than it did a few years earlier.

However, it may be seen that these schools of sociological thought start from a totally different perspective to the structuralist approaches. Unlike them, there is less concern with ideology since it is implicit that the individual is free to interact and to respond to his experiences, so that there is a similarity to liberalism in some ways. Even so, it must be noted that some phenomenologists have also incorporated a marxist radicalism within their analyses. Dawe’s two sociologies are, therefore, manifest in a number of different theoretical schools of thought, all of which have been utilised in the analysis of initial education and some of which have been employed in investigating adult and continuing education.

Concluding Discussion

If the foregoing analysis is substantially correct than it may be concluded that no single sociological perspective actually exists but that various branches focus upon specific facets of social life. Since education is also a social phenomenon it is open to analysis from these different perspectives and that each analysis may contain some of the strengths and weakness of the theoretical perspective itself. And, indeed, education, since it is an element within the wider society, may itself be viewed from the same dual perspective as society itself – as structure and action. Initial education which is much more institutionalised than the education of adults may most clearly be analysed from the holistic perspective and be located within the structures of the wider society while the actual process of teaching and learning may be viewed from the social action perspective. By contrast, adult and continuing education is not as highly institutionalised and systematised as initial education, as the quotation from McCullough (1980:158), cited earlier in this chapter, demonstrated. Indeed, it may be argued that it is actually because the structures of the education of adults have not been so clearly demarcated in the past that greater emphasis has been placed upon the process of learning than has occurred in some other branches of education, i.e. greater emphasis on action than upon structure. Until recently there has been little co-ordination of the education of adults, but as it is assuming a more significant place in society it may become more institutionalised and play a more notable role so that more control may be exercised over it. Indeed, there have already been publications to this effect in several countries and the Ministry of Education in Ontario, Canada, has published a discussion paper ‘Continuing Education – The Third System’ (no date) in which it is suggested that there are advantages to co-ordinating continuing education. Hence, more emphasis may be placed upon the structures than upon the action within the education of adults, at least in some sections of it, in the future.

This dichotomy between structure and action may also be reflected in the origins of the word •education’ itself. It is generally recognised that it may be derived from either one of two Latin words, ‘educare’ or ‘educere’: the first means ‘to train’ which implies to prepare a person to take their place within the structures of society while the second means ‘to draw out’, which places more emphasis upon the person and the process.

However, it may be seen that there are broadly ‘two sociologies’ which relate to structure and action and that there are clear parallels to this in the analysis of education. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are many possible approaches to the sociological analysis of adult and continuing education. This study will employ different sociological perspectives to analyse a variety of concepts and social phenomena within the education of adults. However, it must be recognised that any analyses of social phenomena do so both from a specific sociological perspective and also they will invariably incorporate an ideological perspective, either overtly or covertly. This distinction has already become apparent from Lawson’s (1982) response to the more radical marxist analyses contained in Thompson (1980), where he (1982:10–18) appears to assume that liberal adult education is based upon rationality and, therefore, not ideological whilst the radical analyses are ideological. Such a conclusion is open to considerable discussion and this will occur later in this text. However, before this can be embarked upon it is important to examine the education system itself and place adult and continuing education within that wider social context.