Andragogy Doesn’t Explain Learning—It Explains Control |
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Andragogy focuses on conditions of learning, not evidence that learning occurred.
A learner can be self-directed and still fail to demonstrate measurable growth.
Andragogy provides teaching guidelines but does not explain how learning occurs.
Adult learning theory is a manual for classroom diplomacy, not a map of the mind.
Walk into any corporate leadership retreat or faculty development workshop, and you will encounter a familiar set of rituals. The chairs are arranged in a circle. The instructor has rebranded as a facilitator. Participants are told that, as adults, they are self-directed and ready to tackle real-world problems. It is a flattering premise that affirms the learner and sets the tone for what follows.
This is the social contract of andragogy. Popularized by Malcolm Knowles in the 1970s, it remains the dominant framework in adult education. It is humanistic, respectful, and intuitively right. But while it succeeds as a philosophy of instruction, it falls short as a scientific explanation of how learning occurs.
As a field, we have spent decades refining how to treat the adult learner while largely ignoring the nature of learning itself. If andragogy is a theory of learning, then a central and disruptive question must be asked: Where is learning actually defined?
We talk extensively about motivation, autonomy, and readiness, often treated as the gold standards of the andragogical model. Yet there is a conspicuous absence in the literature: a clear account of what a person can actually do once instruction concludes, which remains the most........