ABSTRACT
Conventional adult education practice rests on the adoption of orthodox approaches to adult learning. This orthodoxy is problematic from a Marxist perspective because it can be shown that these theories embody a range of ideological assumptions. In adult education, the dominant learning theories are the behaviourist, humanistic and cognitive. In a world perspective, the behaviourist approach has been most widely disseminated in distance education, one of the fastest-growing forms of adult education. The humanistic approach believes that a psychology which is able to describe inner phenomenological events will have greater explanatory power than behaviourism. Conventional adult education based on humanistic psychology is incapable of creating the counter-hegemony necessary for socialism. The prescriptions of cognitive psychology focus on the nature of the learner and deduce from that a necessary role for the teacher in expanding the quantity and quality of a student's insights.
