(The Meaning of Adult Education
By Eduard Christian Linde...)
The Meaning of Adult Education
By Eduard Christian Lindeman
"Each of us," wrote Anatole France, "must even be allowed to possess two or three philosophies at the same time," for the purpose, I presume, of saving our thought from the deadly formality of consistency. No one can write about education, particularly adult education, without deserting at various points all "schools “of pedagogy, psychology and philosophy. In-congruities are obvious: one cannot, for ex-ample, be a determinist and at the same time advocate education; nor can idealism be made to fit the actualities of life without recognition of the material limitations which surround living organisms. One cannot, that is, make use of these opposed points of view if they are conceived to be mutually-exclusive. But it is precisely because I do not so regard them that all are included in this essay. Light comes from learning — just as creation comes everywhere -through integrations, syntheses, not through exclusions.
The essay which follows will be best under-stood in the light of personal experience. My formal education began at the age of twenty-one — after I had spent twelve years in various occupations and industries. I could, of course, speak the English language (at least, the Americanized version which workers used) but it was not my natural medium of communication. My initiation to formal education was, next to the unsuccessful attempt to adjust myself to automatic machines, the most perplexing and baffling experience of my existence. The desire somehow to free education from stifling ritual, formalism and institutionalism was probably born in those frantic hours spent over books which mystified and confused my mind. I had already earned my way in the world from the age of nine, had learned the ship-building trade, had participated in strikes, and somehow none of the learning I was asked to do seemed to bear even the remotest relation to my experience. Out of this confusion worse confounded (confounded confusion, someone has called it) grew the hope that someday education might be brought out of college halls and into the lives of the people who do the work of the world. Later I came to see that these very people who perform productive tasks were themselves creating the experience out of which education might emerge. In 1920 I visited Denmark, not primarily to study education but to pick up lost ancestral threads — a quest which arose from my dislocated youth. Here I came into contact with a civilization which, by sheer contrast with hate- ridden Europe, seemed like a cultural oasis in the desert of nationalism. Whereas the victorious nations were grasping for territory, Danish statesmen were conducting a scientific study to determine how much of...
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The Community: An Introduction to the Study of Community Leadership and Organization (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Community: An Introduction to the Study ...)
Excerpt from The Community: An Introduction to the Study of Community Leadership and Organization
Discontent with current political, economic, and social organization appears to be well-nigh universal. Men everywhere are attempting to work out a new way of living together. We live in a period which is likely to produce many theories. Extremists of one sort will want the entire structure of the present destroyed. Extremists of another sort will insist on keeping the old machinery intact. In the meantime, a few men and women here and there will be attempting to evaluate the resources of the present world; these have abandoned all short cuts to progress, and have set for themselves the task of building the future out of the materials at hand.
Science has produced a technology which now permeates and affects all of modern life. The technologists or the specialists are indispensable to modern communities. All divisions of knowledge have been divided into smaller divi sions. 'the specialist selects his field and de votes his life to it. The rapid increase of knowledge since the beginning of the use of the scientific method has made specialism inevitable.
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Eduard Christian Lindeman was an American social philosopher and educator. During his career he worked at Chicago YMCA and 4-H clubs and served on various commissions.
Background
Eduard Christian Lindeman was born on May 9, 1885 of Danish parents in St. Clair, Michigan, United States, the youngest of ten children. His mother was Fredericka Johanna von Piper, a Danish noblewoman who had been disowned by her family when she immigrated to the United States with her husband, Frederick Lindemann, a poor sheepherder. The family established roots in the Western pioneer village but were plagued by sickness (a brother and three sisters died within a single year) and grinding poverty. His father died when Lindeman was nine, and his mother died the following year.
Education
Lindeman was encouraged by a farm employer to enroll, at the age of twenty-two, at the Michigan Agricultural College, East Lansing, from which he graduated in 1911.
Career
Lindeman worked in the fields as a child and in the shipyards of Port Huron as a youth. Later he worked as assistant to the minister of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Lansing (1912 - 1915), as state extension director of 4-H in Michigan (1915 - 1918), and as instructor of rural sociology at the YMCA's George Williams College, Chicago, beginning in 1918. Lindeman's work with the YMCA marked the beginning of his lifelong commitment to adult education.
His first book, The Community: An Introduction to the Study of Community Leadership and Organization (1921), drew upon his YMCA experience and on his work with farm cooperatives. Forced from a teaching position in North Carolina by Ku Klux Klan protests against his civil rights activities, in 1922 Lindeman moved his family to New Jersey, where he was a free-lance lecturer and contributor to the New Republic, the Survey, and the Inquiry.
His Social Discovery: An Approach to the Study of Functional Groups (1924) quickly established his national reputation as a pioneer in the field of social service later known as group work and won him the post on the faculty of the New York School of Social Work that he held until his retirement in 1950.
Lindeman's teaching and writing during the next quarter of a century demonstrated such diverse influences as liberal Christianity, consumers' cooperation, the Danish folk schools, the philosophies of Mary Parker Follett and John Dewey, the writings and examples of Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson (he later edited an anthology of Emerson's writings), his association with the New School for Social Research, and the movement for continuing adult education. Lindeman's The Meaning of Adult Education (1926), according to one biographer "his most widely read book, " made a seminal contribution to that movement. Ever an activist as well as a scholar, Lindeman practiced the democratic participation that he preached. He worked through voluntary citizens' associations--including the Urban League, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council Against Intolerance, the Federal Council of Churches, the National Child Labor Committee, the National Sharecroppers Fund, and the Association on American Indian Affairs--and through such professional groups as the National Conference of Social Work, the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, the National Council of Parent Education, and the American Association for Adult Education. To each of these organizations he made major contributions over many years as board member, officer, or director of research.
From 1935 to 1938 he was director of the Department of Community Organization for Leisure in the Works Progress Administration. His travels took him to Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, England, and the Soviet Union, to Germany in 1945 as educational adviser to the British Army of Occupation, and in 1949 to India, where he was visiting lecturer at the University of Delhi.
After his retirement Lindeman continued to lecture, consult, and write. Many years of ill health took an increasing toll, however, and he died in New York City before he could serve as president of the National Conference of Social Work, a position to which he had been elected in 1952.
Lindeman openly opposed the authoritarianism of communism but he was frequently attacked during the postwar years for his alleged radicalism.
Views
Lindeman was never a systematic or a speculative philosopher; in presenting his ideas he was more forceful and eloquent than original. He was a pragmatist, a realist, and a relativist, but he was also an idealist, much influenced by Emersonian transcendentalism. Like other progressive educators of his generation Lindeman had faith in individual and social intelligence, asserted that education was primarily a process of problem solving, and sought ways to make means and ends compatible. An advocate of self-government at every level, he feared the processes of centralization but favored the extension of government controls over the economy, while opposing excesses of social engineering. To a generation of social workers he proposed that it was not enough to alleviate the consequences of poverty and dependency: the chief responsibility of the profession must be to work with and through neighborhood and community groups toward restructuring social institutions and rooting out injustice. The professional expert served best as a facilitator, he believed, enabling laymen and volunteers to work out programs and policies. Citizen participation, learning by doing, was the democratic way to achieve democratic goals; empirical research had to be founded on humane values.
Personality
In the classroom as well as in more informal settings, Lindeman was dynamic, challenging, provocative, and open to the ideas of others. He encouraged students to put forward their own points of view. Irving Brodsky, a former student and friend, recalled him as a "generous-hearted and profound teacher, critical and scholarly both keen and kind. " Lindeman inspired affection and respect; candid and outspoken, he also sparked controversy and opposition, often of those who feared the force of his ideas and personality.
Connections
Lindeman married Hazel Charlotte Taft in 1912. They had four daughters.