Eduard C. Lindeman and the meaning of adult education

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Perhaps best known today for his work in adult education, Eduard C. Lindeman (1885 – 1953) also wrote one of the first books on community development, was an early explorer of groupwork and worked to extend popular education. In this piece, we explore his life and classic work The Meaning of Adult Education.

contents: introduction · the making of the meaning of adult education· the meaning of adult education · conclusion · references and further reading · acknowledgements how to cite this piece

Eduard Christian Lindeman was born in 1885, in St Clair, Michigan USA, He was the son of German/Danish immigrants. Lindeman’s early work life included spells as a stable cleaner, nurseryman, grave digger, brickyard worker and deliverer of groceries. He also worked in a shipyard and factories in Detroit. Aged 22 he went to Michigan Agricultural College (later Michigan State University) where his interests widened considerably. He began on a ‘sub-freshman’ programme (what we might now call an ‘access course’) and then joined the main programme. At Michigan, he became involved in the YMCA, developed a writing society and helped to found the Ethnic-Sociological Society. As his daughter was later to write, his career defied categorization (Leonard 1991: xxiii). He went into agricultural extension work (via the Boys and Girls Clubs and 4-H) essentially as a youth worker and community organizer. Lindeman then joined the teaching staff at the YMCA College of Chicago – a situation that he left after a year as he enraged many of his colleagues with his forward-looking social and theological ideas. After a short, and again problematic, spell at the North Carolina College for Women in Greensboro he joined the New York School of Social Work (later the Columbia University School of Social Work) in 1924 – and stayed there until he retired in 1950. He became closely associated with the New Republic, served on various commissions, was advisory editor to Mentor Books and was Chair of the American Civil Liberties Union Commission on Academic Freedom (1949).

As well as writing on adult education, Eduard Lindeman produced early, pioneering, texts on community and community organization (1921), and on working with groups (1924). He continued to be a strong advocate of group work and community organization and was a significant voice in the establishment of these within the discourse of North American social work during the 1930s. He also wrote about social research (1933 with John Hader), social education (1933) and democratic living (1951a, 1956). Arguably, his exploration of social philosophy kept it ‘alive’ within social work. Lindeman possessed a ‘consistent determination never to separate human problems from philosophical consideration’ and demanded ‘that the profession should not separate them’ (Konopka 1958: 12). He died in 1953.

As can be seen from the above, Eduard C. Lindeman was able to work across traditional subject borders and disciplines. Huey Long (1989: xviii) comments that he was ‘primarily a social worker’ (for this read youth worker and community worker) ‘turned philosopher and that his view of adult education was influenced accordingly’.

Not only could he relate education, social sciences and social problems to the problems of the day; he could combine concepts from social sciences with both natural sciences and philosophy. He was a pioneer on many interlocking fronts – a pioneer social scientist with an allegiance to both science and to society and its processes, and also a pioneer in adult education and social philosophy. (Leonard 1991: xxiii)

According to Stewart (1987: 4), Lindeman gained the bulk of his intellectual constructs from three principal sources: ‘Bedrock philosophical underpinnings came from John Dewey (within a context earlier defined by William James and Charles Sanders Peirce)’. Other roots can be found in the work of the philosopher/educationalist/theologian Nikolai Grundtvig (the founder of folk high schools in Denmark) and the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The mix of Emersonianism, romanticism, Jeffersonian agrarianism and pragmatism involved here created conflicts for him especially in the tension between individualism and collectivism (Leonard op cit). However, it was the pragmatism of Dewey that was to provide the central foundation for his approach to adult education.

Lindeman was a friend and colleague of John Dewey and shared with him a concern for social justice, a belief in the possibilities of education and human action, and a deep commitment to democracy. Dewey’s concern with the emancipation and enlargement of experience fed directly through into The Meaning of Adult Education. But that was not all. ‘It is generally accurate to say that adult education as articulated by Eduard Lindeman, is a derivative of Deweyan progressive education’ (Stewart 1987: 4). It is also important to recognize the contribution of other Progressive writers and activists to the development of Lindeman’s thought. This list includes Lester Ward (1906) on the science of society; the social action of settlement pioneers such as Jane Addams (1910); the concern of Mary Parker Follett (with whom he was later to collaborate) with local democratic renewal (1918); and the explorations of Walter Rauschenbusch (1907) and others around the social gospel.

The flourishing of progressive thinking and organization, and Lindeman’s thought, in particular, has to be put in the context of the profound changes that were part of the North American experience in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth. Industrialization, technological advance, the move to the cities and immigration alongside the ideological and religious shifts associated with Darwinism and other developments had a powerful impact. Lindeman’s response to these forces shares much with other Progressives such as Dewey, Follett and Addams as they made sense of the movement from ‘the small town to the great community’ (Quandt 1970). Education was seen as a key lever in and a component of, social change.

The making of The Meaning of Adult Education

By the time that Eduard Lindeman sat down to write The Meaning of Adult Education in the mid months of 1926, he had worked as an educator in a variety of settings with young people and adults. He had also found a reasonably convivial academic home at the New York School of Social Work; moved into a large family house, Greystones, in High Bridge, New Jersey (achieved with the financial help of Dorothy Elmhirst – who was one of the founders of the New School for Social Research, New York and was to establish Dartington Hall in 1926 with her husband Leonard – see Young 1982); and had become involved with Herbert Croly and the progressive journal The New Republic. He had written some articles on adult education and had already published books on community organization (1921) and groups (1924). There had been some significant development in the formulation of adult education theory and practice, especially in Britain. Perhaps the most visible and significant expression of this was The 1919 Report (Ministry of Reconstruction 1919). There was also a growing literature that reflected on contemporary developments (e.g. Mansbridge 1920; Yeaxlee 1920, 1925). In the United States, there had been considerable interest in the field of adult education by a select group of philanthropic institutions, the most significant of which was the Carnegie Corporation and several other writers were developing their understanding of the field (see, in particular, Martin 1926; Hart 1927).

The moment was right for Lindeman to set out his thinking. He had ideas in abundance that had been ‘brewing for years’ (Stewart 1987: 2). The ten chapters that constitute the book were written quickly and buzzed with ideas. Nothing was rewritten. The result was an uneven and quirky book. His ideas, when taken separately, were hardly original. There were obvious gaps in, and issues with, his exposition of adult education (the most important being a failure to properly define or delineate what he meant by adult education). Yet as an act of synthesis and as a popular statement of core assumptions the book broke new ground. As David Stewart (1987) has commented, ‘As a social philosopher he largely facilitated, rather than invented, adult education theory’.

The Meaning of Adult Education

Eduard C. Lindeman’s vision for education was not one bound by classrooms and formal curricula. It involved a concern for the educational possibilities of everyday life; non-vocational ideals; situations not subjects; and people’s experience – and it is worth quoting at some length from the opening chapter of the book.

A fresh hope is astir. From many quarters comes the call to a new kind of education with its initial assumption affirming that education is life – not merely preparation for an unknown kind of future living. Consequently all static concepts of education which relegate the learning process to the period of youth are abandoned. The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings. This new venture is called adult education not because it is confined to adults but because adulthood, maturity, defines its limits…

Secondly, education conceived as a process coterminous with life revolves about non-vocational ideals. In this world of specialists every one will of necessity learn to do his work, and if education of any variety can assist in this and in the further end of helping the worker to see the meaning of his labor, it will be education of a high order. But adult education more accurately defined begins where vocational education leaves off. Its purpose is to put meaning into the whole of life.

Thirdly, the approach to adult education will be via the route of situations, not subjects. Our academic system has grown in reverse order; subjects and teachers constitute the starting-point, students are secondary. In conventional education the student is required to adjust himself to an established curriculum; in adult education the curriculum is built around the student’s needs and interests. Every adult person finds himself in specific situations with respect to his work, his recreation, his family-life, his community-life et cetera – situations which call for adjustments. Adult education begins at this point. Subject matter is brought into the situation, is put to work, when needed. Texts and teachers play a new and secondary rôle in this type of education; they must give way to the primary importance of the learner… The situation-approach to education means that the learning process is at the outset given a setting of reality. Intelligence performs its functions in relation to actualities, not abstractions.

In the fourth place, the resource of highest value in adult education is the learner’s experience. If education is life, then life is also education. Too much of learning consists of vicarious substitution of some one else’s experience and knowledge. Psychology is teaching us, however, that we learn what we do, and that therefore all genuine education will keep doing and thinking together.

Authoritative teaching, examinations which preclude original thinking, rigid pedagogical formulae – all of these have no place in adult education. ‘Friends educating each other’ says Yeaxlee, and perhaps Walt Whitman saw accurately with his fervent democratic vision what the new educational experiment implied when he wrote: ‘learn from the simple – teach the wise’. Small groups of aspiring adults who desire to keep their minds fresh and vigorous; who begin to learn by confronting pertinent situations; who dig down into the reservoirs of their experience before resorting to texts and secondary facts; who are led in the discussion by teachers who are also searchers after wisdom and not oracles: this constitutes the setting for adult education, the modern quest for life’s meaning. Lindeman 1926a: 4-7

Lindeman also added a strong commitment to progressive social action to these qualities. In a later article, he provides us with a compelling picture of a committed and action-oriented form of education. It:

is not formal, not conventional, not designed merely for the purpose of cultivating skills, but… something which relates [people] definitely to their community… It has for one of its purposes the improvement of methods of social action… We are people who want change but we want it to be rational, understood. (Lindeman 1951b: 129-130)

In Dewey’s (1916) terms this is education that enables people to share in a common life. It also looked for a critical understanding of experiences and situations. Eduard C. Lindeman saw the potential of collaborative and informal educational processes for people to question taken-for-granted ideas, beliefs, values and behaviours.

Process and method. Eduard K. Lindeman wasn’t writing about these matters in abstraction. He had a concern for praxis. His early work looked to the process of youth organization and to group work. Such questions of process remained a concern of his in his writing. Working in small groups was central to his understanding of a worthwhile education – indeed it can be argued that the use of small group discussion was a central element in his characterization of the process of adult education. Lindeman was deeply critical of the extent to which a preoccupation with the content of education overbalanced pedagogical thought.

Adult education happily requires neither entrance nor exit examinations. Adult learners attend classes voluntarily and they leave whenever the teaching falls below the standard of interest. What they learn converges upon life, not upon commencement and diploma. The external tokens of learning are removed so that the learning process may stand or fall on its intrinsic merits… And because adult education is free from the yoke of the subject-tradition, its builders can experiment boldly even in the sacrosanct sphere of the pedagogical method. Indeed, if adult education is to produce a difference of quality in the use of intelligence, its promoters will do well to devote their major concern to method and not content. (Lindeman 1926a: 114)

The danger here is of overbalancing in the other direction – but Eduard C. Lindeman’s conclusion here can be understood within his overall concern with the development of critical and analytical thinking and action. ‘Education is a method’, he wrote, ‘for giving situations a setting, for analyzing complex wholes into manageable, understandable parts, and a method which points out the path of action which, if followed, will bring the circumstance within the area of experiment’ (Lindeman 1926a: 115).

Curriculum. Thus far we have reviewed the assumptions that Lindeman saw as underpinning adult education, and the significance and distinctiveness of small group discussion in terms of its method. It is also necessary, when examining his contribution, to attend to what he had to say about the curriculum for adult education. Lindeman, as we have seen, was concerned about an over-focus on the subject within schooling and formal education. There are, however, particular themes that appeared in his work. He was concerned with cultivating individual freedom – but with due regard for the needs of others. ‘We live in freedom’, he wrote, ‘when we are conscious of a degree of self-direction proportionate to our capacities’ (Lindeman 1926a: 50). He also looked to the fostering of collective, democratic action, diversity and difference, and the educative potential of associational life.

Adult education specifically aims to train individuals for a more fruitful participation in those smaller collective units which do so much to mold significant experience. (Lindeman 1926a: 38)

Our personalities can be redeemed if we insist upon a proper share in the solution of problems which specifically concern us. This means giving more attention to small groups; it means as much decentralization, diversity and local autonomy as is consistent with order. Indeed, we may well sacrifice order, if enforced externally, for valid difference. Our hopes flow from the simple conviction that diversity is more likely to make life interesting than is conformity, and from the further conviction that active participation in interesting affairs furnishes proper stimulations for intellectual growth. (Lindeman 1926a: 89)

Orthodox education may be a preparation for life but adult education is an agitating instrumentality for changing life. Institutions, groups and organizations come within the scope of continuing, advancing learning insofar as these collective agencies furnish the medium for educational experience. (Lindeman 1926a: 105)

As Stephen Brookfield (1987: 22) has commented, time and again Lindeman argued that both through practical necessity and moral imperative, adult education was a social effort. It was central to the health and maintenance of democracy (Stewart 1987: 171).

In conclusion

Lindeman’s vision for adult education was sweeping and uplifting. He identified what he believed to be central assumptions. In doing this he was seeking to assert what he was later to describe as an ‘organic’ conception of adult education. He wanted to counter the ’mechanistic’ school (familiar to us today as the central and dominant paradigm in educational policy and practice). Essentially concerned with the extension and development of existing schooling forms for instrumental ends, such approaches were, in Lindeman’s view naïve, narrow and static (Brookfield 1987: 5). The emphasis on the exploration of situations and experience could have drawn straight out of Dewey (1910; 1916; 1925).

In his search for a fresh understanding of adult education and Lindeman avoided presenting us with a tight definition. He considered that it might be too constraining for enquiry – a position he held throughout the rest of his life. However, we can get a glimpse of thinking in a paper also written in 1926 where he describes adult education as:

A cooperative venture in non-authoritarian, informal learning, the chief purpose of which is to discover the meaning of experience; a quest of the mind which digs down to the roots of the preconceptions which formulate our conduct; a technique of learning for adults which makes education coterminous with life and hence elevates living itself to the level of adventurous experiment. (Lindeman 1926b quoted by Stewart 1987: 12-13)

At one point he was to describe this orientation as ‘andragogical‘ (in a paper written with Martha Anderson and published in 1927) – which appears to be the first English-language use of the term (see Stewart 1987: 108-9).

There was a downside to this ‘looseness’ and the speed with which the book was written. There are some infuriating lacunae and inconsistencies and here I just want to comment on two. First, just what did Lindeman mean when he argued that ‘education is life’? As we have seen, Lindeman wanted to reject the notion that education is preparation for life – something that occurs at a particular stage. It arises when people engage with life’s situations and is enriched when encouraged and nurtured. But is education life? It might be more accurate to say that education is a process coterminous with all of life rather than it is life (Stewart 1987: 111). Further, while Lindeman offers the promise of a different approach to adult education – one whose limits are set by notions of adulthood rather than age stage – he then retreats from this by confining attention to the education of adults. He, thus, failed to open up the exploration as a continuing, consistent and lifelong process. It was left to Basil Yeaxlee a couple of years later to take the first steps in this direction.

Second, while it is important to understand education as being fundamentally about furthering human flourishing, and the disposition and ability to live life well, there is a danger in setting ‘vocational’ against ‘adult’ education. Given the highly instrumental and narrowly economic concerns that drive much policy – then as now – it is not surprising that Lindeman sought to champion the non-vocational. However, a more interesting course in many respects would have been to draw on writers like John Ruskin to question dominant notions of the vocational and to explore how it could be approached in a more uplifting and compatible way.

Eduard C. Lindeman provided us with a powerful account of what is involved in education activity that looks to enhance human flourishing and to help people to live life well. It is a vision that shares much with later writers like Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire (although there is no direct line between him and them). His work fed straight into the thinking of central figures in adult education such as Malcolm Knowles (see, for example, his [1950] book on adult informal education, or his exploration of andragogy [1970; 1980]). Indeed, Knowles regarded Lindeman as his mentor. In many respects, Lindeman’s vision for adult education is close to Josephine Macalister Brew’s view of youth work (1943) and informal education (1946).

Lindeman’s significance for informal education can be seen at several levels. First, Eduard Lindeman’s background, return to education as a mature student and then work as an organizer mirrors the experience of many informal educators. He is someone that many of us can identify with pretty quickly. Second, Eduard Lindeman’s vision for adult education is not bound by classrooms and formal curricula. It involves a concern for the educational possibilities of everyday life; non-vocational ideals; situations not subjects; and people’s experience. Third, Eduard Lindeman adds a strong commitment to progressive social action to these qualities. He provides us with a compelling picture of a committed and action-oriented form of education. In Dewey’s terms, this is education that enables people to share in a common life. Fourth, we can also see Lindeman’s concern for a critical understanding of our experiences and situations. He saw the potential of collaborative and informal educational processes for people to question taken-for-granted ideas, beliefs, values and behaviours. Last, Eduard Lindeman wasn’t writing about these matters in abstraction. He had a concern for praxis. His early work looked to the process of youth organization and group work. Such questions of process remained a concern of his in his writing. Working in small groups was central to his understanding of a worthwhile education – indeed it can be argued that the use of small group discussion was a central element in his characterization of the process of adult education.

The Meaning of Adult Education is one of those books that you want to press into people’s hands. ‘Read this’, you might say to the current crop of English and Welsh youth services policymakers and managers, ‘think “youth work” and you might understand what the work is actually about’. However, from the evidence of their activities, they have neither the imagination nor the heart to grasp what is being said. Consumed by the language of delivery and targets, focused on curriculum and content, and bought-off by the promise of funding they have sacrificed both young people’s fundamental interests and given into anti-democratic centralism. Sadly, many workers have also fallen prey to the same dynamics. Luckily hegemony is never complete and, as Lindeman (1926a: 8, 9) argues it will be the case that some will come to reject the ‘orthodox and regulated methods’, for they ‘want to count for something; they want their experiences to be vivid and meaningful; they want their talents to be utilized; they want to know beauty and joy; they want all of these realizations of their total personalities to be shared in communities of fellowship’.

Key works

(1926) The Meaning of Adult Education, New York: New Republic, republished in 1989 by Oklahoma Research Center for Continuing Professional and Higher Education. The Meaning was written in six weeks flat – and it shows in places. However, it is an extraordinary book. It sets out the central principles of adult education and provides a powerful vision of possibility.

(1956) The Democratic Man. Selected writings of Eduard C. Lindeman, Boston: Beacon Press. Edited by Robert Gessner. A comprehensive collection of extracts from his books and articles organized around five themes: the democratic way of life; groups; classrooms without walls; social work in action; and social action.

(1987) Learning Democracy: Eduard Lindeman on adult education and social change, Beckenham: Croom Helm. Edited by Stephen Brookfield. Selection organized around the nature and method of adult education; democratic social change and adult education; and building democracy through adult education.

Other important writings:

(1921) The Community. An introduction to the study of community leadership and organization, New York: Association Press.

(1924) Social Discovery. An approach to the study of functional groups, New York: Republic Publishing.

(1933) Social Education. An interpretation of the principles and methods developed by The Inquiry during the years 1923 – 1933, New York: New Republic.

(1933) Dynamic Social Research, New York: Harcourt (with John Hader).

(1951) The Democratic Way of Life (with T. V. Smith), New York: Mentor Books.

Biographical material: Lindeman has been well served by his biographers. Each of the three main works approaches the man and his work from a different angle. Together they provide a fascinating portrait – but one with significant questions left unanswered.

Konopka, G. (1958) Eduard C. Lindeman and Social Work Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 220 + x pages. Part one of the book looks at his life. Part two examines the development of a social work philosophy around community processes, social group work and democratic propositions. A concluding chapter examines his ‘theory’ of social work.

Lindeman Leonard, E. (1991) Friendly Rebel. A personal and social history of Eduard C. Lindeman, Adamant, Vermont: Adamant Press. 214 + xxiv pages. Engaging and speculative exploration of the man by his daughter Elizabeth. She looks to some of the gaps in the other biographies as well as revealing significantly more about his personal life.

Stewart, D. W. (1987) Adult Learning in America: Eduard Lindeman and his agenda for lifelong education, Malabar, Fl.: Robert E. Krieger. 289 + xviii pages. An excellent study of Lindeman’s educational thinking and progressivism set in a biographical framework.

Bibliography

Addams, J. (1910) Twenty Years at Hull House, New York: Macmillan.

Brew, J. Macalister (1943) In The Service of Youth. A practical manual of work among adolescents, London: Faber.

Brew, J. Macalister (1946) Informal Education. Adventures and reflections, London: Faber.

Brookfield, S. (ed.) (1987) Learning Democracy: Eduard Lindeman on adult education and social change, Beckenham: Croom Helm.

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Lindeman, E. C. (1926a) The Meaning of Adult Education, New York: New Republic. Republished in a new edition in 1989 by The Oklahoma Research Center for Continuing Professional and Higher Education.

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Acknowledgement: The picture “Shadow Work” is by Tony Hall and is reproduced under a Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic)- Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anotherphotograph/3389627948/

How to cite this article: Smith, M. K. (1997, 2004, 2020) Eduard Lindeman and the Meaning of Adult Education, The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education [https://infed.org/mobi/eduard-c-lindeman-and-the-meaning-of-adult-education/. Retrieved: insert date].

© Mark K. Smith 1997, 2004 2020. First published May 8, 1997.

This article contains material from Mark K. Smith (2004) ‘Eduard Lindeman and the making of adult education’, Youth and Policy 82: 75-86.

Last Updated on April 7, 2021 by infed.org