Geschichtsschreibung und Quellenkritik

In the view of cultural history, andragogy precedes pedagogy. The task of the andragogy is the social distribution of cultural innovations. The passing on of such innovation to the following generation is the task of pedagogy. Andragogy and pedagogy have been carried out over thousands of years in the mode of informal learning. With the dawn of literacy, formal learning emerges which then institutionalizes forms of schooling for the young generations. Institutions for andragogical formal learning have been created with Renaissance and Reformation, with agrarian and scientific-technical revolution as well as Enlightenment. The cultural theory and the cultural history of the Enlightenment address the relationship between andragogy and pedagogy as human formation (anthropagogy). Pedagogy has not followed this theory. Instead it insists on the position of being the original and proper education.

The article presents the results of the author’s study on the views of pedagogy students on politics and education. The research has been undertaken subsequently to the 2015 parliamentary elections won by the party “Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc” (“Law and Justice”, PiS). During the election campaign, this party’s program offered radical changes, also in the Polish educational system. The aim of the study was the recognition of the level of interest in politics, the approach to democracy and education as well as the students’ relation to the solutions in the educational system proposed by the winning party. The result shows discrepancies between general views on education (rather lefty and liberal) and the first modifications of the party (rather right-wing and conservative). This finding gives reason to verify the aims and methods of political education of adults in Poland, as well as in other European countries.

The field of education policy, in particular adult education policy, is gaining importance in recent international-comparative research on education and adult education. In comparative politics, education policy is also a young but increasingly established issue. The close connection of education policy to the discipline of comparative politics, as well as theories used in that discipline, provide a well-founded research approach on education policy, which should be considered by international-comparative research on adult education. This paper is a literature review, systematically analysing publications dealing with educational policy topics in an international-comparative perspective, using approaches and theories from the discipline of comparative politics. The contribution is based on a systematic literature research in relevant databases for the period 2006 to 2016. 65 titles were included in this literature review. The theories and approaches identified in the publications include the Welfare State Theory, Varieties of Capitalism, Partisan Theory, Globalisation and Europeanisation, Path dependency, and Actor-centered Institutionalism. This paper presents the theoretical approaches used in the publications and outlines their research results. Additionally, the paper discusses limitations, potential use and benefits of these theories and approaches for international-comparative research on adult education policy.

Programs of further education reflect societal interpretations of education and are the result of professional pedagogical action. Research on programs of further education and on the underlying planning processes is educational research that reconstructs educational concepts in a phenomenological manner and that provides a knowledge base for decisions that need to be negotiated by society. In this context, program-planning models constitute partial perspectives on program planning. One goal of the article is to give an overview of program-planning models. A classification of these models is important because it reveals the diverse links and questions to be dealt with in both research and practice and it contributes to a well-founded model selection in research and practice. The article’s main focus is to present a newly developed classification of program-planning models and its linkages to research questions.

This article is concerned with the discourse and policy of lifelong learning in Europe after 1973. It deals with the question whether the 1980s have to be seen as a period of diminishing interest in lifelong learning or as a formative phase of so called neoliberalism. Applying a corpus lingustic approach, it analyses the official documents of the European Communities as archived in the database EUR-Lex. The results are interpreted as the expression of a new European governance regime called “technology corporatism” (Bornschier), which was jointly supported by supranational political actors, large-scale industry and science and also affected their understanding of lifelong learning.