| Abstrakt: | The reckless promotion of competency-based education and training and the
imposition of regulatory curriculum standards go hand in hand with similar attitudes
among adult education scholars and experts who increasingly back off from envisaging
adult learning as an area of human interaction where pedagogy finds its humanistic
meaning and significance and where communicative rationality can be enacted and
taught. 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 the
technical one. This is due to the colonisation of the lifeworld by the imperatives of
the system (Habermas) which remains blind to a human interest in self-formation,
autonomy, emancipation, and gaining critical awareness. As the lifeworld system is
colonised, there emerge autonomous subsystems, such as global economies, markets,
media, and business corporations. Operating relatively independently of state and
democratic control, they impose instrumental rationality in sectors of key importance
for viable democracy and subject education to its interests and standards. Through the
use of manifold technologies of micro-power (Foucault), people are now “condemned
to learn” – only to make profits, if not to subsist in uncertain times. |