aNDragogY verSUS PeDagogY or From PeDagogY to aNDragogY: a re-aSSeSSmeNt oF KNowleS’S DIlemma wIth the DeveloPmeNt oF learNINg theorY

Conceptualization Figure 1. Kolb’s learning Cycle indeed, when Jarvis (1987) developed his learning model in 1987 – which was a development on Kolb – he found very few of the people whom he researched actually generalised from a single learning experience. however, he did claim that his research probably covered children’s learning as well as adult learning although he had not included any children in his sample. in this sense, he was reflecting the 1970s debate about andragogy and to a very great extent agreeing with the sentiments expressed by houle (1972). over the years that followed that research, has continued in human learning and mezirow (1991; and associates, 2000) has also built of this with his theory of transformative learning. while mezirow has pointed a way forward, he has not answered the question posed by Knowles. Perhaps one of the clues to understanding the original problem actually lies in the ideas of existentialism that mcKenzie and elias pointed towards in that original debate but they looked at age and gender rather than the whole person. rogers [1994(1969)], however, had highlighted this issue very early although it had never been brought into the original debate – it is the whole person who learns, not just the mind or the body – and in this he agreed with Knudson. once we recognize this, we enter a different debate about learning because we have to ask the question about the nature of the person who has the experiences from which learning occurs. now this had not been done, although Knowles’ characteristics of the adult learner had begun to do this, although not in a systematic manner. The person is a combination of the body and the mind and we cannot separate them this recognition allows us to advance learning theory. andragogy versus Pedagogy or From Pedagogy to andragogy Part 3. towards a Theory of existential learning learning always begins from human experience, so that we can see how both Knowles and Kolb were pointing us in this direction – but experience is neither mindless nor bodiless and so it is important that we begin to explore the idea of experience before we can proceed – something that Knowles did not do because he rather assumed it to be the sum of previous experiences amassed throughout the life time and so he became concerned and the nature of the adult. Experience: michael oakeshott (1934) suggested that the concept of experience is one of the most difficult in the philosophical vocabulary – see also James (capps and capps, 2005) but it has also become predominant in the vocabulary of learning. oakeshott was clearly right and one of the problems with a great deal of the writing on experiential learning is that it does not seek to explore the nature of experience itself. But we do have experiences when we as persons interact with the world in which we live and the sum total of these episodic experiences might be regarded as the life-time experience. experience occurs in space and time – space can be any place but time is a more problematic concept. we take time for granted. The philosopher Bergson (1999 [1965]) describes this as durée, the sociologists schutz and luckmann (1974,p.7) write about it in the following way: I trust that the world as it has been known by me up until now will continue further and that consequently the stock of knowledge obtained from my fellow-men and formed from my own experiences will continue to preserve its fundamental validity... From this assumption follows the further one: that I can repeat my past successful acts. So long as the structure of the world can be taken as constant, as long as my previous experience is valid, my ability to act upon the world in this and that manner remains in principle preserved. while the psychologist csikszentmihaly (1990) calls it ‘flow’ ‘the way people do things when consciousness is harmoniously ordered’. For him being is always connected to the ontological present. The point about learning is that this flow is interrupted: we are no longer in a harmonious relationship with our world – we now no longer fit into our world – a disjuncture has occurred and we experience dissonance. we no longer can take our life world for granted and durée becomes a consciousness