Overcoming Alienation as the Practice of Adult Education: The Contribution of Erich Fromm to a Critical Theory of Adult Learning and Education

Abstract

Erich Fromm's analysis of the commodification of contemporary life, his description of automation conformity, and his call for the overcoming of alienation represent important, though ignored. elements of the critical tradition that have great resonance for the practice of adult education. Drawing particularly on the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Fromm conducted a radical, yet highly accessible, analysis of adult life and learning. He argued that learning to penetrate ideological obfuscation, and thereby overcome the alienation this obfuscation induced, was the learning task of adulthood. Adult education as a force for resistance would make people aware of ideological manipulation and educate them for participatory democracy. By calling his ideas humanist, Fromm ensured that his work beckoned enticingly to many educators. But his normative humanism was a militant, Marxist humanism, entailing the abolition of capitalist alienation and the creation of democratic socialism.