Andragogy: Adult Learning Theory in Perspective

Considering that the education of adults has been a concern of the human race for a very long timeas Grattan well documents in his In Quest of Knowledge-it is curious that there has been so little thinking, investigating, and writing about adult learning until recently. Although many of the ancient great Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman teachers taught adults and philosophized about the aims of adult education and invented techniques especially for adults (such as the Socratic dialogue), I can find nothing in their writing that indicates any interest in the processes of adult learning. They had theories about the ends of adult education but none about the means of adult learning. They presumably made the assumption that adults learned in precisely the same way that children learned (or, better, in the same way that they believed that children learned). These assumptions and beliefs (and blindspots) persisted through the ages well into the twentieth century. There was only one theoretical framework for all of education, for children and adults alike-pedagogy-in spite of the fact that pedagogy literally means