ABSTRACT
This is a paper about the relationship between the theory and practice of adult
education which is undertaken as part of the struggle for socialism. Although
the adult education movement and the socialist movement were closely
associated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Boughton
1997b), contemporary adult education in most western countries, as both a
professional practice and a field of academic study, is now largely pursued
within the neoliberal discourse of ‘learning for earning’ (Cunningham 1993),
the acquisition of the vocational skills needed to become more productive
human resources in capitalist workplaces, often re-designated as ‘learning
organisations’ (Sawchuk 2008). In response, and to distinguish our theory and
practice from this dominant trend, adult educators like myself who continue to
work in the longer, more politically progressive tradition of our field now
describe our work as popular education (Crowther, Galloway, and Martin
2005). This term also identifies us with the liberatory pedagogy made famous
in Latin America in the 1970s by Paulo Freire and continuing until today (Kane
2001; Schugurensky 2011). Although Latin American popular education regularly receives attention in
the English-speaking radical adult education literature, this is less true of the
*Email: bob.boughton@une.edu.au
Asia Pacific wing of the movement. I acknowledge my particular debt to the popular educators of the Philippines, who first introduced me to the term on an exposure tour I took to their country with a delegation of activists from the Australian anti-military bases movement in 1988, and who came to Australia several times in subsequent years to help train us in their methodology. The Filipinos were part of a network which already at that time extended across the region, to Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, West Papua, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Kanaky and the Solomon Islands. This movement, whose development since the 1980s has many parallels with the Latin American experience, continues to have a significant influence in campaigns for a nuclear-free future of peace, justice and self-determination from the old colonial powers, the USA, Britain, France and Australia which still dominate our region.
