Responsibility, Participation and Social Justice in Adult Education

In these times of crisis, and with changes sweeping throughmany areas of our social, political, working and economic lives, we would do well to consider how the concepts of responsibility, participation and social justice are being recast within the sphere of adult education. With the advance of neoliberalism, the outlines by which we recognise these principles have been redefined. More than ever, they are understood in terms of processes of inclusion/exclusion, or the possibility/impossibility of participation, of operating as active citizens, as individuals engaged in the interpretation of the problems inherent in social injustice and the search for solutions (Sen, 2009), not to mention the abandonment of political responsibility in favour of ever greater responsibility on the individual (Mayo, 2014). In Lavoro futuro, Ettore Gelpi decried the field of continuing education’s almost total renunciation of its function as a source of creation, of its political and emancipatory duty to work towards greater social justice, and of its rootedness in the principle of education and training as a political project capable of transforming both society and the individual.