Shaking the Foundations: The Critical Turn in Adult Education Theory

With the collapse of the dominant paradigm, the "andragogical consensus", the field of adult education is presently occupied by an array of competing discourses. In recent years adult education theorists have turned to Habermasian critical theory to reconstruct the discipline and provide direction for emancipatory practice. Building on the assumption that we are in the beginning stages of this reconstructive project, this article provides a brief history of the keyword, "critical", and demonstrates how the critical theoretical tradition from Marx to Habermas can be interpreted as a socially and historically grounded theory of adult learning.