Does Andragogy Define Adult Education?
It is interesting to consider the extent to which andragogy can be claimed as the distinguishing feature of adult education as a field. Though he moved from a belief in andragogy as the antithesis of education for children toward the idea of a continuum, Knowles presented andragogy as “very anti-schooling, seeing as an important part of its mission…’liberating’ adult learners from its unhappy consequences” (Usher, Bryant, and Johnston 2002, p. 81). This suggests that the boundary between the education of children and that of adults is very significant for andragogues. Yet some of the most fertile ground for andragogy has been K-12 education and the closely linked arena of the community college (Guffey and Rampp 1997; Robles 1998). Although it can be argued that within a highly formal educational setting andragogy must inevitably be watered down (for example, it is daunting to imagine learner control of evaluation in medical school), the line between the practices of child and adult edu
