Work-experience and adult education

Abstract

Much recent thinking and developmental activities within the area of adult education and lifelong learning emphasize the importance of a perpetual interplay between work-experience and educational processes. In this article, a number of theoretical and empirical aspects of this interplay are highlighted. Empirically, the analysis takes as its focus point a developmental-project conducted by the VUC (adult educational centres) in cooperation with the European Unions Social Fond. VUC have tried to develop a number of ways to implement general legal-based educational courses in traditional subjects in the context of the working processes of industrial and service industries. The article discusses different ways of understanding and classifying these educational experiments. The discussion is based on basic distinctions concerning lifelong learning, educational and organisational theory and finally the subject-matter and the context of teaching. It is argued that the organisational and the educational discourses run together in ambivalent ways, resulting in an obstruction of educational perspectives. Finally, it is suggested, that adult education needs an attachment to enlightenment philosophies in order to reinstall the educational aspect of research and didactics.