Adult Education And Citizenship - A Contested Terrain

Abstract

Citizenship is a contested terrain, very much linked to configurations of power, and often, as in the case of progressive literature, associated with contributions made by individuals and groups/movements to the democratic public sphere. This entails an engagement in the ongoing struggle to safeguard public spaces from the onslaught of privatisation and commodification (Giroux, 2001). It also involves transforming hitherto undemocratic and exclusive structures into more democratic and inclusive ones. Adult education for citizenship, in this context, is a democratic education, one in which students learn about democracy not simply by talking about it but by engaging in a democratic learning experience governed by non-hierarchical social relations of education. This is in keeping with John Dewey's (1916) over-arching concept of education for democracy.