Learning landscapes in Europe: Historical perspectives on organised adult learning 1917-1939

Abstract

In a previous article addressing the ‘social organisation of adult learning practices’ in Europe in the period 1500 to 1914, the point of departure was a critique of the ‘institutional fallacy’ in the historiography of ‘adult education’ in many countries. Historical narratives predominantly tend to focus on descriptive categories of those phenomena manifesting the ‘institutional’ structures and practices that constitute the generally accepted and ‘preferred histories’ of distinctive national traditions of ‘adult education.’ Such narratives serve to construct an historical lineage for the development of long-standing forms of ‘adult education’, often with a strong celebratory purpose. However, these ‘nationalist’ institutional narratives of ‘successful’ innovations frequently manipulate the historical record with the exclusion of ‘unsuccessful’ institutions or innovations considered as having ‘failed’. Critical historiography seeks to correct the historical record through the active recovery of contributions made by otherwise ‘unremembered’, plainly ‘inconvenient’, and simply ‘embarrassing’ phenomena. Such acts of historical recovery are significantly and systematically associated with alternative, radical, subversive, and revolutionary social groups and cultural movements. The standard work on Dutch workers’ education in the early twentieth
century, for example, devotes one footnote among 391 pages, to the repertoire of adult learning activities organised by the Union of Social Democratic Women’s Clubs (Hake et al, 1984). This suggests that the historiography of organised adult learning practices must necessarily resort to revisiting ‘forgotten sites’ of struggle, in this case an autonomous women’s organisation, that do not sit happily with widely accepted histories of ‘workers education.’ This suggests, furthermore, that the social organisation of adult learning activities can only be meaningfully comprehended in terms of the reframing of their more complex historical articulations with broader economic, social, political, and cultural forces in society.