Abstract
It is a nearly unassailable proposition that among the Olympians of North American adult education, the iconic figure of Malcolm Knowles stands as the most familiar to adult educators. Among those in peripheral fields his is likely to be the only recognizable name. Five years after his death, he was still the most cited North American adult educator; we all know of that word not found in dictionaries which he popularized and turned into a system for the practice of structured adult learning; and some even remember that gentle soul and avuncular, cheery face. This almost intimate familiarity recalls to a reviewer’s mind the witticism of 19th century author and clergyman Sydney Smith, who quipped, “I never read a book before reviewing it. It prejudices a man so” (Robertson, 1998, p. 402). The reader of George William Henry’s Malcolm Shepherd Knowles: A History of His Thought is unlikely to have any “prejudices” either created or dispelled, as the book, derived from Henry’s dissertation, does not attempt an argument. Rather it is an unadorned tracking and—it is impossible to avoid the word—summary of the progression and evolution of Knowles’ ideas through a reading of each of his 25 books (including revised editions) and major monographs from the 1950 Informal Adult Education to Designs for Adult Learning in 1995.
Knowles may have been the last, and possibly the only, adult educator to attempt the ever elusive and probably chimerical Grand Unifying Theory of adult education. Today a maturing field and a postmodernist zeitgeist contribute to a flourishing though jumbled theoretical landscape. Rather than seeking a unifying theoretical principle, the field now seems more atomized, and the pressures of scholarship and publication encourage a greater focus on specialization and micro-research. Henry shows that Knowles, by contrast, thought on a large stage even as early as the first book, Informal Adult Education; and some of the ideas of later works, including self-direction, advocacy of a nonhierarchical teacher–learner relationship, and opposition to teacher grading, are foreshadowed in this very first volume. By the late 1970s, nearing the apogee of his influence, Knowles felt that the concept of andragogy came very close to a unifying theory, and he even expanded the application of andragogy in the revised History (1977) to all age-groups by changing “adults” to “human beings” in his definition of that term: “the art and science of helping human beings learn” (cited in Henry, p. 124). Andragogy, of course, is Knowles’ signature contribution, but in tracing nearly a half century of Knowlesian thought, Henry is quite helpful in revealing the chrysalis stages of andragogy as found in the now generally unread early work. Henry catalogues Knowles’ interest in themes of informal adult education, group dynamics, maturation, methodology of learning, child–adult learning differences, self-directed learning, and lifelong learning. Knowles’ interest in democracy was at the heart of his resistance to hierarchy in learning, but the education-democracy theme as a bulwark against authoritarianism had also laced the literature of adult education since the twenties. Henry frequently mentions ideas and themes that Knowles revisits in different works, but restricting himself to summary, he refrains from judgment or a deeper exegesis of the validity of Knowles’ ideas.
Henry’s strength is his extraction of the major ideas from the pilgrim’s progress of Knowles’ 46 years of book and monograph publishing, along with a presentation of these ideas in an accessible, summative format. Though the long-term trajectory of Knowles’ thought is fundamentally consistent, Henry observes carefully its variations, including the advances but also some of the refinements and retrenchments over the half century. For example, he points out that by the 1984 Andragogy in Action, Knowles is less sure that andragogy is a theory at all: “I don’t know whether it is a theory; this is a controversial issue” (as cited in Henry, 2011, p. 139). Pedagogy’s star had also risen, from its nadir as a “millstone” (Knowles, 1989, p. 72) in 1970 to a “parallel, not antithetical” (Knowles, 1984, p. 12) model along with andragogy by 1984. Henry spends little time with broad historical context or biography (there are no interviews or glimpses into personal life), but he nicely indicates several influences ranging from the great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (one of Knowles’ Harvard undergraduate professors and author of the still quite readable The Aims of Education) to Lindeman, Dewey, Maslow, Rogers, Lewin, Havighurst, Houle (his doctoral chair), Overstreet (seminal for Informal Adult Education), and Tough (seminal for adult learning projects). Henry burrows into the writings, provides a nice index, and by reminding the reader of interconnections among the works, goes beyond simple annotation. Collectively, these are notable contributions, placing Henry at the forefront of Knowles scholarship, particularly the pre-andragogy work, a borrowed term Knowles first used in book form in Higher Adult Education in the United States (1969).
One remarkable thing that Henry does—in a muted and presumably quite unintentional way—is to reveal Knowles’ peculiar radicalism. He does this partly in showing Knowles’ quixotic zeal for seeing andragogy as the transforming mechanism to help us reach the utopian “educative community,” with its lifelong learning centers and a wholly transmogrified education and learning infrastructure, peopled by a citizenry of lifelong learners. He first envisioned the educative community in The Adult Education Movement in 1962, repeated it in the 1970 Modern Practice, and continued with it in the 1977 History. But Knowles’ radicalism is even more on display in his evolving insistence on the subordinate role, not merely a collaborative role, of the misnamed “teacher.” He shuns the familiar perch of teacher as expert, knower, knowledge leader, and knowledge dispenser and embraces that of the facilitator, helpmate, counselor, advisor, and resource person to adult learners (no longer “students”) who are presumed to be keenly in quest of their own—not the facilitator’s—learning objectives. Knowles’ faith in the learner’s preeminence in planning his or her own learning is what he calls in the 1970 Modern Practice the “theological foundation” of andragogy (as cited in Henry, 2011, p. 89). His belief in self-inquiry was so strong, so radical, that in 1961, Knowles defied at least three millennia of education’s central premise and, according to Henry, “denied the teacher any real ability to teach another person” (p. 89). Where learner motivation was not yet present, the learner was to be helped to pivot from the comfortable teacher-dominant, content paradigm to the unfamiliar learner-dominant, process paradigm, and the success of andragogy depended on that re-visioning. In 1977, while a student in Knowles’ contract-based Foundations course, I made a similar point in a term paper, namely that the efficacy of andragogy depended on the learner both learning and embracing the new paradigm. Knowles scribbled in the margin (in green, never red) “Great!” But I did feel a little cheated when three students presented the history of adult education while the author of the 1977 History sat 15 feet away. Henry does show that Knowles made allowance for teacher-centered training, but his eye was always on the learner, and he introduced his version of contract learning as the implementation mechanism for andragogy in 1975 in Self-Directed Learning. Andragogy was the message, and contracts were the means. He spoke rhapsodically of learning contracts in 1978 and 2 years later in Modern Practice (1980) called them the “truly magical way to help learners to structure their own learning” (as cited in Henry, 2011, p. 132). What the telescope was to astronomy, contracts were to andragogy—a magical tool, a technology, critical to the development of the field and the furtherance of an idea. The radicalism of the theological foundation— relinquishing control of the learning to the learner, making the learner paramount—as well as the scope of andragogy’s diffusion and current implementation may perhaps be judged by the modest number of andragogues among the adult education professoriate using learning contracts. The radicalism did eventually soften. For example, contracts were not appropriate when learners were totally unfamiliar with new content or with instruction involving precise psychomotor skill, and instructors “should be clear about what the boundaries of freedom are” and what their “criteria for making evaluative judgments will be” (Knowles, 1986, as cited in Henry, 2011, p. 153). Knowles could be a moving target, but being willing to adjust his ideas, he was innocent of Emerson’s “foolish consistency.”
Henry offers a prose that is plain but capable, and happily unencumbered by the bloat of postmodernist academese. The chapter structure is organized around the sequential and cumulative “phases” of Knowles’ thinking. As Henry progresses through the corpus, he reminds us of connections among the works, notes new ideas when first introduced (such as the initial and soon-to-be classic assumptions about adult learners in The Leader Looks at the Learning Climate monograph of 1965), and generally presents the gestation, birth, and young adulthood of a constellation of ideas Knowles collectively called andragogy. Though an alternative organizational strategy does not readily suggest itself, the repeated pattern of summary of each work in chronological sequence, usually accompanied by the dissertation-esqe accoutrements of multiple headings, endless bullets, listings, and conclusion sections eventually tends to pale, especially given the light analytical touch and the absence of any sustained critical excursions by the author. In this, Henry is more chronicler than critic, neither damning with faint praise nor praising with faint damns.
But Knowles has had many critics, and Henry does not see his role as joining their ranks. He is an explicator. His detailed exploration of the whole body of Knowles’ work means that, inevitably, even those most intimately familiar with andragogy and its ardent progenitor will come away from the book knowing things they did not previously know. Nevertheless, it is some disappointment that Henry chooses not to explore in a final chapter any of the unresolved, and possibly unresolvable, problems of andragogy. For example, how well does the theological foundation square with a discipline, or even a single course, where mastery of an established body of content knowledge is essential for safe or even competent practice? (Knowles’ not quite satisfactory resolution in his contract-portfolio Foundations course was to list about 16 course objectives, from which, after a self-diagnostic needs assessment, we were to choose three or four for detailed exploration while gaining competence in the others by listening to other students’ presentations.) Or another: Are the assumptions about the adult learner too idealistic, especially in a culture of mandated training and continuing education, and even graduate education, where paper-chasing and credentialing are too well known? A third: Where is the place for simple, natural, but often compelling and grand curiosity as a motive for adult learning, given that the assumptions seem to reduce motivation to developmental tasks and pragmatic problem solving? Or a fourth: While anecdotal evidence of andragogy’s effectiveness as a superior learning strategy for adults is often passionately championed, when, if ever, may we expect something definitive from the science side of “the art and science of helping adults learn”? Regrettably, Henry avoids such questions. Had he wrestled with those or their cousins, and thus been both annalist and analyst, he would have helped justify the “must read” accolade in the anonymous Preface. Still, given Knowles’ Olympian stature, it is well within bounds to say that Henry has offered the field an imperfect but necessary book.