Adult Education Research: in Quest of a Map of the Territory

Abstract

An analysis is undertaken of what governs knowledge production in the discipline of adult education. The study indicates that the claim for growing intra-disciplinary importance of adult education research has been accepted too readily. The territory of adult education has been defined mainly from assump tions of the characteristics of the learner. The functions which adult education fulfills in society have hardly come into consideration. It is almost as though all problems concerning the territory could be reduced to psychological ones. The author argues that this reductionism in combination with a stress on sophisticated methodology per se and a lack of conceptualization of the phenomena under study has prevented the development of the discipline of adult education.