Adult education and social movements : perspectives from Freire and beyond

Abstract

The disenchantment with leftist, especially social democratic, parties in the West and elsewhere can easily lead to faith in social movements as organizations which apply pressure, combat co-optation (though not always) and are often perceived to provide the freedom and non-hierarchical mode of operation not found in political parties, although there is often a great divide between the rhetoric and reality in this regard. The purported attributes of social movements might very well be «talked up». One wonders whether social movements have been perceived to constitute an alternative to the «defeated left» as a result of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Is the invocation of social movements an appeal to a deus ex machina? Are they the present day political prophets that need to be invoked, just like those other prophets that Max Weber (2001) invoked, in a different context, at the end of The Protestant Ethic when he sought a way out of the «iron cage»? In this paper we explore issue surrounding the relationship between adult education and social movements.