Rewriting the History of Adult Education:

The search for narrative structures

Dr Barry J. Hake
Eurolearn Consultants,
The Netherlands

Introduction
In the collections of university libraries worldwide, one can normally locate relatively small
sections of volumes pertinent to the history of adult education. Such volumes may include
monographs and edited volumes with reference to the broad picture of the history of adult
education and specific periods in the development of adult education; studies of particular
institutions and organizations at national and local levels; biographies of important individuals;
and the celebration of specific institutions in jubilee volumes. In the main, these volumes will
relate to the history of the country where the library is located. A much smaller number of
volumes will relate to ‘the great elsewhere’ and the history of adult education in other countries,
while comparative histories will be relatively scarce items. Even more scarce will be volumes in
foreign languages about the history of adult education in other countries.
Irrespective of their geographical scope or the period covered, the core issue with regard
to all histories of adult education concerns the structure of the historical narratives which
endeavour to tell the story of the development of the institutions and practices characteristic of
adult education. There are two key questions common to the structure of historical narratives,
namely: a) the circumscription of the field of study in terms of the historical phenomena
recognized as comprising ‘adult education’; and, b) the construction of important ‘eras’ or
‘formative’ periods in the development of adult education.

Circumscription of the area of study

The definitions of ‘adult education’ used in historical narratives raise fundamental questions
with regard to the phenomena which are included in or excluded from historical studies of
adult education. National histories tend to be constructed in terms of some sense of an ‘adult
education movement’ which is regarded as a clearly definable social system of the
individuals, institutions and associations which have been responsible for the development of
adult education through time. This perspective views adult education as a field of readily
recognisable activities which constitute the national system of institutional providers which
emerged within a sequential process of historical development. These historical narratives
assume three major forms. Firstly, they trace the emergence and development of
organizations and practices in the form of institutional histories at national, regional and local
levels. Secondly, they are organized around significant individuals who are regarded as the
great innovators and reformers in adult education. Thirdly, they relate the development of
successive periods of philanthropic initiatives, intervention by governments, legislation, and
public funding of the provision of adult education. Such narratives are constructed in terms
of institutional success which tends to result in a unilinear narrative of the development of

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some set of well-known institutions or practices. In this manner, historical studies tend to
comprise the selective construction of a lineage for the growth of ‘remembered’ institutional
forms of adult education. These historical narratives are often recorded as those forms of
adult education which constitute the ‘national’ tradition of adult education practices. The
major problem with these approaches is that they manifest a ‘selective tradition’ in their
reconstruction of the received histories of national adult education traditions. Consciously or
unconsciously, these selective accounts of the success of successful and enduring institutions
actively exclude the unremembered, the inconvenient and the historically embarrassing.
Historical understandings of adult education as the story of successful ‘formal’
institutions, however, actively exclude a vast range of social and cultural phenomena in the
more diverse spheres of non-formal and informal adult education. Although historical research
must necessarily devote considerable attention to the detailed study of the institutions,
significant historical actors, and the development of public policy, historical accounts of the
development of adult education must necessarily lead out to the general history of society.
Such an approach must lead away from the specific and historically bounded contexts of
institutional history into the broader economic, political, social and cultural history. One of
the most striking features of the literature on the history of adult education, for example, is the
widespread evidence of the significant contribution made by social, political and cultural
movements to the development of adult education. It is instructive, therefore, to extend the
search for relevant historical studies which undertake an analysis of the historical relationships
between social movements and the development of adult education in terms of the broader
patterns of economic, social, political and cultural change beyond the realms of the history of
adult education.
The broad and diverse range of social and cultural phenomena identified here as the
legitimate object of study for the historian of adult education is understood in terms of the social
and cultural practices involved in the social organization of communication and learning. This
opens up the field of historical description and analysis of adult education in terms of the social
organization of communication and learning in which adults were either organized by others or
organized themselves for the purposes of disseminating and acquiring knowledge, skills and
sensitivities. Innovation is sometimes undertaken by a dominant social group, while it may be
carried out by alternative or oppositional social movements. Reconstruction of the ideas,
institutions and practices associated with adult education has to be pursued in terms of the social
relationships involved in the social organization of communication and learning. The term
‘social organization’ refers here to the complex range of institutions, social movements and
groups which were involved in the historically specific development of adult education. Some
of these institutions, movements and groups will be recognized immediately as ‘adult educa-
tion’, while others were embedded in the economic, political or cultural dimensions of social
life. The historical development of adult education institutions and practises is a socially
structured process within societies, and this is a question of dominance and dependence in the
history of social, political, economic and cultural relationships. This results in a more inclusive
understanding of the range of non-formal and informal adult education

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Formative periods in the history of adult education
Historical narratives are characterized, in the second instance, by the marked consistency with
which they relate the development of adult educational institutions and practices in terms of a
number of specific ‘eras’ or ‘formative’ historical periods or. The standard institutional histories
tend to be formulated in terms of the notion of ‘eras’ which describe periods of major change in
the institutional development of adult education. Such eras can also be regarded as periods of
high levels of activity in ‘formative periods’ of vigorous activity in the development of adult
education institutions and practices. In terms of evidence-based empirical indices of activity,
such formative periods were characterized by, firstly, high rates of innovation associated with
the development of new institutions and practices; secondly, the significant expansion in the
numbers of adults involved in organized learning activities; and, thirdly, the opening up of
participation in organized learning to new social groups or ‘publics’, and, fourthly, significant
levels of interest in developments taking place in other countries. The latter phenomenon was
expressed in reports of visits, translations of foreign texts, and articles in contemporary journals.
Formative periods were interspersed, however, with periods with a low conjuncture in terms of
little innovation and change. This indicates the need to recognize the historical reality of breaks
and shifts in historical development rather than the gradual unbroken line of the development of
institutions and practices. The European and Anglo-Saxon literatures, for example, tend to
reconstruct the history of adult education in terms of four significant formative periods.
The first of these periods was associated with the Protestant reformation in North-
Western and Central Europe during the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of
the seventeenth century. Development of the organization of adult learning activities in this
period was influenced by the invention of the printing press, the translation of the Bible into the
vernacular, bible-study groups, and high levels of adult literacy. A ‘reading public’ emerged
which gave rise to the demand for books, new literary forms such as devotional books, books of
‘manners’, and the first ‘encyclopaedias’ of knowledge. This was associated with new forms for
the distribution of the printed word by colporteurs, booksellers, circulating libraries, and reading
circles. In the Catholic areas of southern Europe, however, the Counter Reformation was
marked by the Baroque rejection of the promotion of literacy among the general population and
the emphasis upon visual imagery rather than the written word. This geographical division
between Northern and Southern Europe was expressed in very different dynamics in the
development of adult education. These dynamics subsequently exerted their influence in the
different strands of European expansion to and colonialism in other continents. They continue to
exert their influence in contemporary problems of illiteracy in many countries throughout the
world.
From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, a second formative period in the
development of organized adult education throughout Europe and in the American colonies
began to exert its influence. The so-called Enlightenment movement, which marked the start of
the European modernization process, was in effect a trans-national movement which gave
priority to education, for both children and adults, in the improvement of society together with
an emphasis upon individual moral behaviour in the service of the ‘common good’. Historical
research provides evidence of the activities of the state and voluntary societies and associations
in the development of elementary education, the advancement and diffusion of knowledge,
encouraging the rational improvement of commerce, manufactures and agriculture, the
stimulation of literature, poetry and drama, the organization of lectures and scientific

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demonstrations, circulating and lending libraries. The first adult schools were established in this
period. The development of an active publishing trade and the further growth and diversification
of the reading public was expressed in the periodical press, newspapers and the growth of a
political press. One of the most manifest consequences of this period throughout Europe and the
American colonies was the development of radical political movements, often organized in the
form of corresponding societies, which demanded democratic rights and freedom of speech on
behalf of both the commercial middle class and the artisan class in opposition to the closed
oligarchies of dominant regimes. Such radical groups and their adult education activities were
frequently repressed with a focus on the prohibition of printing and selling of books and
pamphlets in the vernacular. Books in French, such as the Encyclopaedia of Diderot and
d’Alembert, were printed in The Netherlands, while books in the Greek language were banned
by the Ottoman authorities and were secretly imported from the printing presses of Budapest.
This phenomenon of ‘underground adult learning’ has remained a significant dimension of adult
education in later periods of repression. The long-term repercussions of the French Revolution
in 1789, which in itself fuelled radical movements thought Europe, resulted in the early
nineteenth century in the emergence of nation states. The cultivation of national identity led to
the emphasis upon the development of national systems of elementary education and the
organization of ‘improving’ educational activities for adults. This was associated with the need
to exert more rigorous control upon the self-organized learning by ‘the common man’, and the
need to instruct adults in their rights and duties as ‘responsible citizens’ of the nation state. In
the longer-term, this formative period, throughout Europe, experienced its nemesis in the
revolutions of 1848 and their subsequent repression throughout Europe. This resulted in
emigration of many radicals together with the active export of many forms of self-organized
adult education, from German in particular, to the United States and elsewhere.
Following this period of repression and emigration, the period between the 1870s and
1930s has been designated, in the literature as a third important formative period. This period
was characterized by industrialization and urbanization which were accompanied by the
emergence of the organized working-class, a militant women’s movement, and the struggle for
the universal right to vote. This resulted, on the one hand, in the development of adult
educational activities organized independently by socialist, communist, and anarchist political
parties, together with the trade unions and the women’s movement. The period witnessed a
significant expansion of independent working-class forms of provision such as the
workingmen’s’ associations, Workers’ Educational Association, Workers’ Houses, Workers’
Book Clubs, Workers’ Travel Associations, Lenin and Marx houses, and the diverse range of
educational initiatives associated with the Second Communist International. On the other hand,
there was a range of educational responses to this challenge by conservative and liberal parties,
together with the hierarchies of the Catholic and Protestant churches. This resulted in the
development of new institutional forms for the provision of adult education such as university
extension, and university settlements and co-called Toynbee work, the arts and crafts
movement, folk houses, popular universities, public libraries, together with the folk high schools
in Scandinavia, and other forms of residential education elsewhere. These forms of adult
education provision were largely intended to provide educational solutions to the social question
of the emergent working class and they promoted reformist solutions to widespread concerns
with urban housing, family life, working conditions, sanitation and health, prostitution, and
alcohol abuse. Inherent to this conflict between independent working-class and middle-class

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sponsored adult education was the need to educate citizens to make responsible use of the
extension of the right to vote after the First World War. Civic education became a key theme in
adult education provision as was clearly demonstrated in the institutionalisation of University
Extension in the English-speaking world and the development of adult education institutions
throughout Europe. These institutions placed the emphasis upon liberal adult education and also
focussed upon new didactic methods, such as reformist pedagogy in Weimar Germany and
elsewhere. This gave rise to an interest in the study of adult education, which resulted in the
creation of the first chairs in adult education at the universities of Nottingham and Tampere in
1927.
This period also witnessed the development of the concern of well-intentioned
employers in new forms for the dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge to their
employees. From the 1851 Great Exhibition onwards, there had been effort to bring employers
and workers together in continuing education, learning in the workplace and putative forms of
vocational educational and training. On the one hand, employers sought to establish Industrial
Museums, perhaps badly named, which were intended to make new technological knowledge
and production methods available to the working population by way of public demonstrations
and short courses. Universities became involved in this process with the development of
University Extension services devoted to the needs of agriculture and industry. On the other
hand, elementary forms of vocational education and training developed with an emphasis upon
technical drawing so that skilled workers could gain insights in the working of new machinery
and production processes. At the same time, there was a growing concern with the changing
employment patterns of women’s participation in paid work. Initiatives by the women’s
movement in the 1890s were enhanced by the experience of the First World War when women
took the places in factories of the men who were at the front. This resulted in often vigorous
debates about the occupations which were appropriate to women and their needs for vocational
training beyond the traditional domestic spheres of caring, cooking, sewing and nursing.
Following the Civil War in Finland, for example, there were attempts to retrain women as
electricians and plumbers rather than as weavers and seamstresses.
Of particular significance later in this period were the consequences of the Russian
revolution in 1917, the end of the First World War, and the national independence movements
following the subsequent peace treaties, and the of the rise of Fascism and National Socialism
during the 1930s. The first All-Soviet conference on adult education was held in 1918 and the
keynote address was given by Lenin, who did not fail to name the enemies of the revolution.
The carnage caused by the First World War resulted in significant interest worldwide in the role
of adult education in the promotion of peace and international solidarity. The 1920s witnessed
the establishment of numerous international associations, the first world conferences on adult
education, and the establishment of international institutions such as the International Peoples’
College in Ellsinore. The peace settlements of Versailles and Trianon broke up the territories of
the Tsarist Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and granted national independence
to many countries in the Baltic, Central Europe and the Balkans. In these newly independent
nations, adult education became a battle ground during the 1920s and 1930s between democratic
and nationalist groups. Fascist and National Socialist regimes were responsible during the 1920s
and 1930s for the reorganization of adult education in the service of the state in Portugal,
Germany, Italy, Spain, and other countries in Central Europe and the Balkans. This latter
development had fundamental consequences for the organization of adult learning throughout

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Europe, which included the development of settlements and work-camps for the ideological
socialization of movement adherents, in particular the emphasis upon youth movements, and the
so-called re-socialization of recalcitrant radicals such as intellectuals, social democrats and
communists. The first concentration camps were established in Germany in 1933 which were
devoted to the re-socialization of the recalcitrant through hard labour. At the same time, there
were the refugees who took their reformist pedagogy with them to other countries and who
became innovative forces in other adult education systems.
Fourthly, the period between the 1950s and the present-day comprises a significant
formative period which has fundamentally reshaped the organization of adult educational
institutions and practices, especially in the global context. The end of the Second World War
led, on the one hand, in the longer term to the emergence of national independence
movements in the remnants of the British and French empires in Africa and Asia. This
process of contested decolonisation involved the recognition of a new role for adult
education in nation building and economic development in the Third World which was
driven by UNESCO and its institutes. A series of world conferences, respectively Ellsinore
(1949), Montreal (1960), Tokyo (1972), Paris (1985), and Hamburg (1997) have focussed on
the role of adult education in post-colonial countries. The emphasis upon the importance of
literacy for development gave rise to the repression of emancipation movements in many
countries in South and Central America. On the other hand, the end of the Second World
War gave rise in Europe to the Soviet Russian hegemony in the Baltic countries and Eastern
Europe. Adult education was put to work here in the service of the socialist revolution with
priority, especially in terms of access for adults to higher education, for party members,
women, the military, workers, and farmers.
In Western Europe, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, the late 1960s and
the 1970s were marked by the development of compensatory educational opportunities for
adults. This involved ‘second-chance’ and ‘second-way’ adult education, with an emphasis
upon outreach work to the non-participants in adult education, which was also associated
with the development of non-formal and informal community-based forms of adult learning.
In addition to the rapid expansion of evening and day institutes for adults during this period,
there was a major expansion of distance learning for adults and in particular the
establishment of open universities worldwide. From the mid-1980s onwards, however, this
largely social-democratic driven reform agenda to expand educational opportunities for
adults was displaced in Europe, indeed worldwide, by the resurgence of neo-liberal
ideologies and their emphasis upon vocational education and training for adults as the core
learning message of the global economy. On the one hand, learning in the workplace has now
become the dominant understanding of the development of adult education in the early 21 st
century. The retreat of the state, as the motor of the welfare state and the public responsibility
for the redistribution of educational opportunities for adults, has led to the withdrawal of
subsidies for many traditional forms of adult education and the privatisation of many forms
of provision, while the emphasis has shifted towards individual responsibility for investments
in adult learning. This now often results in the negation of the very real educational needs of
the indigenous unskilled proletariat which is left to fend for itself or who is encouraged to
participate in the commercial learning market-place. On the other hand, global mass
migration has more recently contributed to the question of the integration of immigrants and
the challenge of Islam as the educational issue in multi-cultural societies. A largely un-

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researched area of this multi-cultural context is the role of the Mosque as a learning
environment for immigrants in Western societies.

When these dominant historical narratives of formative periods are examined in comparative
terms, however, significant differences can be identified in terms of the specific historical
dynamics of the development of adult education within any one particular country or region,
let alone the global history of adult education across continents. This has much to do,
nonetheless, with historical differences in terms of the specific national dynamics in relation
to the manifestation of economic development, industrialization, urbanization, internal
struggles around language issues and national minorities, revolutions, occupation by foreign
powers, wars, migrants and refugees. Detailed comparative historical studies make it possible
to identify the subtle nuances within any one formative period which constitute the specific
national responses to major historical transformations in different societies. In this regard, the
notion of formative periods or eras in the development of adult education must be regarded
as providing no more than a rough guide for comparative historical analysis. This is not to
argue that the history of adult education in any one country comprises an absolute exception
to the broad lines of historical development.

Conclusion
Much more research is required when we seek to move towards an over-arching comparative
history of adult education in the European and Anglo-Saxon countries. The larger question here,
however, is the degree to which this approach is relevant to the larger canvas of the global
dimension of the development of adult education. This leads to the almost un-investigated area
of the dynamics of empires, colonialism and post-colonialism in the world-wide development of
adult education. The available standard works on the history of adult education have been
largely written in terms of selective national histories, which in some small measure examine
the colonial tradition of European expansion. Post-colonial understandings of the development
of adult education are only now emerging as narratives of resistance in the old empires together
with the processes of de-colonization, national independence, and indigenous identities. There
are many more such examples of adults learning in difficult circumstances, whether ‘above
ground’ or ‘underground’, whether in adult education institutes, on the barricades, or in prison.
Indeed, the of ‘underground adult education’, often organized by the learners themselves in the
face of oppressive forces is a recurrent, but inadequately researched, theme in the history of
adult education in many countries.
Historical description and explanations of the development of the social phenomena
commonly known as adult education need to be more firmly rooted in the conscious use of
theories and concepts from the social sciences and cultural studies. This is not an argument for
the deconstruction and marginalization of the reform discourses which have dominated
historical narratives about the development of the institutions and practices associated with adult
education in most countries. This is a critique of the strong element of ‘celebration’, the search
for genealogies and the construction of lineages in historical narratives about adult educational
institutions and practices. The history of adult education is not real history when its narratives
produce unilinear collections of the valued national antiques of institutionalised adult education
in the past. It is necessary to recognize the complexity of the levels at which historical analysis

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and interpretation can enter and reconstruct narratives. If the history of adult education is about
the pioneers and their reputations, it is also about the forgotten and the defeated, even the
uncomfortable and inconvenient reminders of the past. If it is about social reformers and formal
institutional provision, it is also about social and cultural movements and their contributions to
the social organization of non-formal and informal learning. If it is about the latter, it is also
about ideologies and struggles between social groups to control communication and learning in
the public sphere. If it is about ideologies and struggles in the public sphere, it is also about the
formation of publics, popular expectations and responses. If it is about the latter, it is also about
the experiences of the autodidact and learning biographies. All these aspects have to be provided
with a theoretical perspective in order to achieve more insightful understandings of the
construction of historical narratives. The history of adult education in its social context still
needs to be written. This will not be a history of the unproblematic development of well-known
institutions. It will be the history of the learning activities undertaken by adults in order to
change society.