Andragogy and Its Discontents : An Analysis of Andragogy from Three Critical Perspectives

PAACE Journal of Lifelong Learning, Vol. 14, 2005, 25-42. 25
Refereed Article
Andragogy and Its Discontents:
An Analysis of Andragogy from
Three Critical Perspectives
Jennifer A. Sandlin
Abstract
In this essay I first provide an overview of andragogy, an idea which has been
a cornerstone of adult education for many decades. Next, I question the
assumptions of andragogy and focus attention on critiques emerging from critical,
feminist, and Africentric perspectives. Finally, I raise questions about the future
of andragogy in adult education.
The concept of andragogy has had “an enormous and far-reaching
influence on the field of adult education practice” (Brookfield, 1989, p.
201) and has created a portrait of adult learning and adult learners that
has been the lynchpin of adult education for several decades (Davenport
& Davenport, 1985a, 1985b; Pratt, 1993; St. Clair, 2002; Welton, 1995).
Based in the educational philosophy of liberal humanism, which has
been the “predominant paradigm of practice within the literature of
North American adult and continuing education” (Brookfield, 1989, p.
203; Elias & Merriam, 1995), andragogy is a method, or a way, of
teaching adults—“the art and science of helping adults learn” (Davenport
& Davenport, 1985a, 1985b; Knowles, 1984, 1990); a philosophy about
adults as learners (Podeschi, 1987); and an ideology “based on beliefs
regarding individual freedom, the relationship between individual and
society, and the aims of adult education” (Pratt, 1993, p. 15).
As a method, andragogy emphasizes the role of the adult educator
as a facilitator who is responsible for creating a comfortable physical
climate as well as a psychological climate of mutual trust and respect,
Jennifer A. Sandlin is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Educational Administration and Human Resource Development, Texas
A&M University.

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collaborativeness, supportiveness, openness and authenticity, and
pleasure (Knowles, 1984). As a philosophy, andragogy creates an image
of adult learners based on the following assumptions: (a) as adults mature
their self-concepts move from dependence towards self-directedness,
(b) adults enter educational activities with life experience which is a
resource for learning, (c) adults are “ready to learn” when they experience
a need to know something or to change a life situation, (d) learning must
be immediately relevant to adult learners, and (e) adults are internally
motivated to learn (Knowles, 1984; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991).
Finally, as an ideology, andragogy promotes individualism as a virtue
and individual growth as the purpose of education and emphasizes self-
fulfillment and private interests over public ends (Pratt, 1993).
In sum, Pratt (1993) states that andragogy is characterized by five
fundamental values or beliefs that, taken together, “constitute a particular
worldview that legitimates certain forms of learning, approaches to
instruction, and judgments about priorities in adult education” (p. 21):
a) a moral axiom that places the individual at the center of education
and relegates the collective to the periphery, b) a belief in the
goodness of each individual and the need to release and trust the
goodness, c) a belief that learning should result in growth toward
the realization of one’s potential, d) a belief that autonomy and
self-direction are the signposts of adulthood within a democratic
society, and e) a belief in the potency of the individual in the face of
social, political, cultural, and historical forces to achieve self-
direction. (p. 21)
Critiquing Andragogy
While there have been debates about andragogy since Knowles
popularized the idea in adult education, most of the early debates focused
on whether adults and children really learned differently or should be
taught differently and on what, exactly, andragogy was (Davenport &
Davenport, 1985a). A different sort of critique emerged from adult
educators, like Griffin (1991), who subscribed to a more sociological
view of adult learning. Griffin (1991) argued that andragogy lacks a
“sense of historical, economic, and cultural forces that shape the
possibilities for and the meaning of individual growth and
transformation” (p. 268).

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More recent critiques of andragogy echo these sociologically-based
critiques and come from researchers who operate out of different
theoretical orientations, including critical, feminist, and Africentric.
While educators in each of these paradigms take the critique of andragogy
in particular directions depending on their main area of interest and
emphasize different kinds of classroom practices as a result, in general
these critiques address some similar issues. An informal, qualitative
content analysis I conducted of critically-focused journal articles
critiquing andragogy from different critical perspectives revealed five
main, interrelated issues that cut across most critical paradigms:
1.
Andragogy assumes wrongly that education is value neutral
and apolitical.
2.
Andragogy promotes a generic adult learner as universal with
White middle-class values.
3.
Andragogy ignores other ways of knowing and silences other
voices.
4.
Andragogy ignores the relationship between self and society.
5.
Andragogy is reproductive of inequalities; it supports the status
quo.
I will first describe briefly each of these general critiques and, then,
will explicate more fully the main areas of critique in the critical, feminist,
and Africentric perspectives on adult education. I am choosing to focus
on these three perspectives because they are viewpoints receiving
increased attention within adult education and they are the viewpoints in
my literature review that critiqued andragogy most frequently from a
sociological perspective.
My content analysis revealed five major critiques of andragogy that
cut across these different critical perspectives. First, andragogy is
critiqued for its failure to consider that education is political (Tisdell,
1998). Through focusing on technical knowledge and practical teaching
techniques, andragogy positions itself as politically neutral and fails to
acknowledge that knowledge is inherently value laden and serves to
socialize and shape behavior (Collins, 1995; Welton, 1995).
Second, andragogy is critiqued for promoting the illusion of a generic
adult learner with White middle-class (and also male and Western, as
pointed out by feminists and Africentrists) values as universal. Andragogy
upholds ideals of individualism, self-fulfillment, self-reliance, and self-

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directedness and, more importantly, assumes tacitly that these ideals are
valued universally by all peoples and all cultures (Collins, 1995; Flannery,
1994; Guy, 1996; Pratt, 1993). This universalizing aspect of andragogy is
critiqued for normalizing one way of being and, thus, acting to promote
everyday sexism and racism in adult education settings.
Closely linked to this critique is the idea that andragogy ignores
“other” (non-White, Western, middle-class, male) ways of knowing and
being and, in the process, silences other voices (Flannery, 1995; Welton,
1995). In andragogy only one worldview is valued or acknowledged;
thus, andragogy ignores other value systems and worldviews and does
not allow for differences in learning preferences. Fourth, andragogy
ignores the relationship between self and society by decontextualizing
the learning process and describing the individual in psychological terms
separate from social, political, economic, and historical contexts.
Consequently, andragogy does not take into account structural systems
of privilege and oppression, based on race, gender, and class, that
influence learning and does not consider how culture impacts a person’s
development and ways of learning (Heaney, 1996; Tisdell, 1995). Finally,
because andragogy promotes itself as neutral while upholding
mainstream values, it omits a critical analysis of “common-sense”
assumptions about cultural, sociopolitical, and institutional constraints
on learning; thus, it is critiqued for reproducing inequalities, for
sustaining hegemonic social arrangements, and for supporting
exploitative structures and conservative agendas (Colin & Preciphs,
1991; Flannery, 1994; 1995; Heaney, 1996).
Critical Perspectives
Hart (1990) states that “critique” refers to “the process of
investigating and denouncing social and individual damages caused by
power” (p. 128). To some extent, then, critical, feminist, and Africentric
perspectives are all “critical”—each challenges the normative
assumptions of andragogy, is concerned with inequity and under- or
mis-representation, and seeks to link critique to action (praxis) through
pursuing social change as a major goal of education. For the purposes
of this essay, however, I will separate out critical perspectives on teaching
adults from feminist and Africentric perspectives in order to try to
distinguish their salient features, although I feel that this separation is
somewhat artificial and arbitrary.

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There are different strands of critical perspectives or pedagogies in
adult education, some of which draw from the critical theory of Habermas
(Cervero & Wilson, 1994; Collins, 1995; Hart, 1990, 1995; Welton,
1993, 1995); some which rely more on Freire’s (1985, 1993)
consciousness-raising education (Lankshear, 1993; Shor, 1992; Shor &
Freire, 1987); and others which move into the critical, postmodern realm
(Flannery, 1994, 1995; Giroux, 1997; Pietrykowski, 1996). Again, these
positions overlap; therefore, separation into distinct categories is also
artificial.
In general, however, educators who subscribe to a critical perspective
on adult education and on teaching adults place “the issue of power or
dominance relations at the center” of what they do (Hart, 1990, p. 126)
and seek to move “beyond the technical rationality of current adult
education practice” (Cunningham, 1992, p. 181). Consequently, critical
educators are interested in power relations and societal inequalities and
have a “concern for forms of education which are liberating rather than
merely adjusting, and which point to new possibilities for thought and
action rather than fixate the learner to the status quo” (Hart, 1990, p.
125). Here the purpose of education is change, of “not merely individual
attitudes and understandings, but [of] social conditions as well” (Heaney,
1996, p. 29).
Because of the concerns and goals of critical educators, their critiques
of andragogy focus mainly on how andragogy fails to challenge structural
inequalities in society and how it works to reproduce the status quo.
According to the critical view, andragogy helps to reproduce inequalities
through holding certain normative assumptions, such as individualism,
as universal (Flannery, 1994, 1995) and excluding such “repressed voices”
as “women, minorities, [and] alter identities” (Welton, 1995, p. 128), thus
privileging dominant groups and obscuring alternative ways of
conceptualizing reality; through decontextualizing learners and the
learning situation (Collins, 1995; Flannery, 1994, 1995; Heaney, 1996; Pratt,
1993; Welton, 1995); and through focusing on technical aspects of
education and, thereby, commodifying the educational experience
(Collins, 1995; Heaney, 1996; Welton, 1995).
Within andragogy “individualism, linear thinking, and Anglo
European values of self-sufficiency have been generalized to all adults
as ‘universal’” (Flannery, 1994, p. 17). To Flannery (1994) this kind of
universalism commits four errors of reasoning—faulty generalizations,
circular reasoning, mystified concepts, and partial knowledge—that

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result, ultimately, in a situation in which only one group is seen as the
norm against which other groups are judged. McLaren (1997) calls
this process “colonizing the definition of what is normal” (p. 263).
McLaren (1997) maintains that American society is undergirded
by a foundation of racism, and Flannery (1994) and Colin and Preciphs
(1991) argue that the universalizing tendency of andragogy perpetuates
that racism (and sexism). Flannery (1994), for instance, critiques adult
learning theories such as andragogy for promoting as “universal” values
that actually are rooted firmly in a particular worldview. She explains
(after Clark & Wilson, 1991) that “learning theories based on
individualism and autonomy [such as andragogy] reflect values and
attributes that are primarily Western, white, middle-class, and male”
(p. 22). She goes on to assert that “to continue to promote learning
theories that have individual achievement as a universal goal is to
continue everyday racism in adult education” (p. 22).
Heaney (1996), too, faults mainstream adult education because it
legitimates dominant values as normative and, thus, perpetuates the
status quo. He states that “an absence of impetus for social change goals
within adult education as a field of practice finds legitimation within
the race, gender, and class bias of the knowledge base on which that
practice is now defined” (p. 14). Pratt (1993) agrees that, because
andragogy emphasizes an “ideology of middle-class America,” it “has
never offered a challenge to hierarchical or exploitative structures in
society” (p. 20).
A closely related critique is that andragogy helps reproduce societal
inequalities through focusing on the individual and divorcing the
individual from a contextualized society. Heaney (1996) argues that
decontextualizing learning has deleterious consequences:
By emphasizing individual over social interests, individuals are
effectively divided from their sole source of power to transform
social institutions—namely, the power of numbers. The structural
determinants of the individual and the individual’s perceived
“needs” for learning are obscured; [sic] and a conservative political
agenda is disguised, maintaining the status quo and creating an
illusion of neutrality by merely responding to putative individual
needs. With such an emphasis, the social order, which is legitimized
and strengthened through the development of individuals, is neither
an intended goal nor is it, apparently, even an object of attention
except insofar as it dictates the agenda for adult learning. (p. 18)

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Pratt (1993), too, argues that andragogy views the learner as “operating
as if he or she has risen above the web of social structures” and, thus,
“does not acknowledge the vast influence of these structures on the
formation of the person’s identity and ways of interpreting the world” (p.
18).
Finally, both Collins (1995) and Welton (1995) critique andragogy for
its inflated concern with “effective teaching practice” (Welton, 1995, p.
128), for its connection with the move for professionalization within adult
education, and for its contribution to the commodification of education.
Welton (1995) states that, through creating a “science” of teaching adults
based on the idea that adults are fundamentally different from children,
andragogy helped push adult education towards professionalization and,
in the process, abandoned social change as a goal. Welton explains
further that, “thus, the boundary of the Discipline was drawn very narrowly
around a set of professionalized practices and another ‘expert culture’
was constituted in an historical period of an expansive welfare-state
capitalism to take its place alongside so many other expert cultures” (p.
129). Welton (1995) also explains that, during the twentieth century, the
field of adult education has
been internally driven to develop a body of knowledge (“common
concerns”) to be used for professional practice in order to gain a
share of an educational service economy. In the twentieth century
the only way to achieve this dubious goal was to rely on empirical-
analytical knowledge to define and organize the field—the impulse
to monopolize competence to control a piece of the increasingly
differentiated social world. Adult educators emerged as part of the
professional middle classes who, in the post-war era, had to “manage
the learning processes” of the subaltern sectors. (p. 131)
Thus, within andragogy “the individual learner as client becomes the
object of an emerging field of professionalized practice,” and education
is commodified and becomes part of the “colonization of the lifeworld”
(Collins, 1995, p. 77).
Feminist Perspectives
While there are many different types of feminist pedagogies—
including psychological, structural, and post-structural models (Tisdell,
1998)—each of which focuses on different concerns, all strands of

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feminisms “are concerned with gender relations and women’s
emancipation, and emphasize the importance of connection, relationship,
and the role of affectivity in learning” (Tisdell, 1998, p. 140). Lather (1994)
suggests that “through the questions it poses and the absences it locates,
feminism argues the centrality of gender in the shaping of our
consciousness, skills, and institutions as well as the distribution of power
and privilege” (p. 242). She argues further that the “central premise of
feminism is that gender is a basic organizing principle of all known
societies and that, along with race, class, and the sheer specificity of
historical circumstance, it profoundly shapes/mediates the concrete
conditions of our lives” (p. 242). Feminist pedagogy, in general,
“foregrounds issues of gender, focusing more on women’s learning,
although many writers also account for race, class, and sexual orientation
differences among women” (Tisdell, 1998, p. 141).
Different types of feminisms also deal to some degree with (a) how
knowledge is constructed, (b) voice, (c) authority, and (d) positionality
or “how to deal with difference” (Tisdell, 1998, p. 140). Feminist
critiques of andragogy, then, while varied, are all concerned with the
way andragogy has normalized and universalized the White, European,
middle class male “adult learner” who possesses values such as
individualism, self-directedness, and self-fulfillment. From a feminist
perspective andragogy has ignored other ways of knowing. Flannery
(1995) states that “among the missing voices in the adult education
learning literature are women, who learn to keep silent as their meanings
differ from those of men” (p. 154). A major concern of feminist pedagogy,
then, is how women have been marginalized in mainstream adult
education.
Building on critical perspectives, certain strands of feminism,
including structural and post-structural, also criticize andragogy for
assuming political neutrality and for not dealing with the “structural
factors of privilege and oppression that affect power relations in the
learning environment” (Tisdell, 1998, p. 140). These more critical
strands of feminism strive towards combating inequalities based on
gender (as well as race and class) and, thus, fault andragogy for its
focus on individual achievement over societal change. While stating
that “it is difficult to be against the idea that learners should have a say
in their own learning,” Tisdell (1995) argues that “the approach of
Knowles and others who emphasize either andragogy and/or the self-
directedness of adult learning tends to focus on the fulfillment of
individual goals” (p. 40). She also critiques andragogy because it does

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not focus on social change or “the empowerment of oppressed groups,”
nor does it “take into account the structural systems of privilege and
oppression based on race, gender, and class that inform learning” (Tisdell,
1995, p. 40).
Africentric Perspectives
Like andragogy, Africentrism is a philosophy or a worldview that has
implications for the learning environment. Africentrism is defined by Guy
(1996) as
a sociocultural and philosophical perspective that reflects the
intellectual traditions of both an African/African American people
and a continent. Africentrism is grounded in the philosophical system
of traditional African societies that are exemplified in the seven basic
values embodied in the Ki-Swahili Nguzo Saba (these include Umoja
[unity], Kujichagulia [self-determination], Ujima [collective work and
responsibility], Ujamaa [cooperative economics], Nia [purpose],
Kuumba [creativity], and Imani [faith] [Hayes & Colin, 1994, p. 3]). . .
. With respect to adult education, it asserts that policies, practices,
experiences, philosophies, ethical issues, theories, and concepts must
be considered and evaluated on the basis of the perspective and
experience of African Americans. (p. 13)
Adult educators subscribing to the Africentric paradigm focus their
critique of andragogy on its failure to consider other worldviews and on
its exclusion of non-White and Western voices, specifically the African
worldview. Coupled with this critique is the idea that because andragogy
universalizes the Western worldview, it helps to reproduce the dominant
cultural hegemony of racism in America (Colin, 1994; Colin & Preciphs,
1991; Guy, 1996). Guy (1996) states that “our concept of how adults
learn, principles of teaching adults, the methods, goals, and purposes of
adult education are based on primarily Eurocentric values” (p. 14).
Consequently, the Africentric paradigm seeks to politicize education
and counter this Eurocentric worldview by opening up discourse to
include other voices, worldviews, and values, specifically those associated
with Africentrism. Harris (1992) states that “education is not an
objective, neutral process. It reflects the cultural, social, political,
economic, and philosophical imperative of the society” (p. 313). Guy
(1996) explains that the “assumptions of individualism and humanism

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must be delimited given the sociocultural frame of reference of
Africentrism” (p. 14).
Following this line of argument, Smith (1994) states that adult
educators need to address the “twin issues of excluded histories and
power relationships”—issues that are “based in the culture of American
education” (p. 17). Because of andragogy’s neglect of other worldviews,
histories, and voices, Smith goes on to argue that “without a more
complete and diverse understanding of the historical and political factors
impacting on the learners, adult education cannot meet the need to enrich
the quality of life for all learners” (p. 17) and suggests that both
practitioners and students need to understand a variety of worldviews.
To facilitate this perspective, he proposes a course that presents an
African-American-inclusive history of adult education.
Dozier-Henry (1994) argues that Africentricity is a “paradigm
emanating from a particular world view” (p. 1) and contrasts the
Eurocentric worldview that underlies adult education with the Africentric
worldview that is “oppositional to the dominant Eurocentric one” (p.
1). She posits further that the Eurocentric paradigm has denied other
systems of thought and, thus, should be exposed and challenged by the
African worldview which is concerned with a “Man-to-Person
orientation, harmony with nature, communalism, [and] felt time and
being” (p. 5).
Alternative Practices of Adult Education
In this section I will explicate how the three alternative perspectives
addressed above move beyond critique to help remedy some of the
problems with an adult education based on andragogy and to facilitate
the creation of a different kind of practice of adult education. Critical
educators advocate for an emancipatory education based on Habermas’s
theories of knowledge-constitutive interests and communicative action
or on Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. Welton (1993) states that “a
philosophy of adult learning influenced by Habermas starts with the
affirmation that human beings are material and historical beings who
have the potential to learn about nature, others, and the self” but adds
that human learning can also “be blocked and distorted” (p. 83) by
systemic institutions. To critical educators, such as Hart (1990) and Welton
(1995), emancipatory education is a form of communicative action that
seeks to counter distortions in three levels of communication: the social-
cultural, the interpersonal, and the intrapersonal. Adding feminist

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