New Social Movements and their Implications for Adult Education

The purpose of this article is to show how adult education is linked to the emerging crisis of modernity; in fact, education has been conceived from its very beginning as part of the project of modernity. If adult education follows the same paths as traditional education, it will end up, like modernity, in crisis too. A sign of this crisis in our field is the increasing split between vocational training and personal development. I will develop my argument by using the example of the so-called “new movements”: new movements herald a cultural transformation, where the individual becomes increasingly a central focus and where social transformation will occur through the transformation of the person. It is argued that adult education will develop its full potential only once it has admitted that it is, as a discipline, another expression of the same cultural transformation the new movements foreshadow.