Racializing the Discourse of Adult Education

Abstract

Adult education scholarship has been racialized through the lens of Eurocentric theory and research. Theoretical paradigms such as Africentrism struggle to gain academic legitimacy as discourses of transformative learning, critical thinking and self-direction - all grounded in the European Enlightenment tradition of the individual pursuit of rational self-knowledge - hold sway. This article reviews the way that repressive tolerance serves to broaden the field of adult education by including racially based perspectives on adult learning, yet simultaneously ensures that they are always seen as an exotic alternative to what is clearly the mainstream Eurocentric perspective. It reviews the way that discourses of criticality can be reinterpreted from the perspective of the African American lifeworld and explores in detail the work of Lucius T. Outlaw Jr. and Cornel West. Both scholars draw partly from the tradition of European critical theory in their attempts to use its central analytical categories (such as alienation, lifeworld, objectification and hegemony) to understand the African American experience. The piece ends with a consideration of how the dominant Eurocentric perspective in adult education can be critiques and challenged.