Introduction
Adult civic education— in specialist literature, especially that written in German, it is used as a synonymous designation of “adult political education”—is, from a historical as well as contemporary perspective, among the main forms of further education (e.g., Beneš, 2014; Veteška, 2016; Act No. 568/2009 Coll. on Lifelong Learning). One could say that its history overlaps with the overall history of adult education, which from its (quasi-institutional) beginnings at the end of the 19th century—whether in so-called bourgeois educational circles, or even more clearly in connection with the workers’ movement—already had a political function in itself. The motto “knowledge is power” was the leitmotif of organized educational activities, where the issue was, of course, social and political power (Nuissl, 2007).
Adult civic education is “a general umbrella term for deliberately organized out-of-school activities intended for the rational analysis of political reality and aimed at creating competencies that enable a person to (better) orientate themselves in the political domain. What is called ‘political’ here is understood—according to the original Greek meaning of the word— as ‘public affairs’, ...” (Behrens, 1994, p. 208).
Its desired outcomes are described in different ways, for example the ability to critique, the ability to orient and act, participation or engagement. Länge (in Nuissl, 2007) considers the competencies of a politically educated person to be the reception and processing of information, communication with others, the formation of one’s own opinion, and an engaged approach to reality. According to Nuissl, this is the most general definition of political competencies that this type of adult education targets.
Of course, ideas of its goals differ. For example, according to Scheuerich, Pohl and Hufer (2004), it should involve regulatory ideas (responsibility, autonomy, emancipation, enlightenment, humanity), key competencies (utopian ability and recollection, global thinking, reflection, continuous thinking, etc.) and political competencies (taking responsibility, civic engagement, decision-making capacity, etc.). Note on utopian ability:* ideas of democracy focus not only on the present but also on the future. They therefore concern individual aspirations and social possibilities, as well as their prospective weighing—Negt (1998) refers to this ability as “the ability of utopia.” On the one hand, it entails future orientation because without a utopian reference point of a possibly better society, social philosophy cannot develop as little as pedagogy could develop without pedagogical utopia—that is, without an idea of a possible emancipatory form of self-realization of the human subject. Pedagogy without this practical orientation toward the future would be unthinkable (Bernhard 2012, p. 22). On the other hand, utopian ability concerns remembrance of suffered wounds and losses, of tensions and searching, which are always inherent in human life.
For Šerák and Dvořáková (2009, p. 33), the “ideal aim of political and civic education (...) is the need to equip the individual with information and skills that help him or her fully assume the social role of a citizen. Concretely, this means reaching a state in which a citizen is capable of making responsible decisions, articulating a clear opinion, orienting themselves within the surrounding social order and, at the same time, actively participating in public life.” Veteška (2016), by contrast, names as the main aim and outcome full social integration and active citizenship.
In listing various target categories of adult civic education, we could continue further. What is important is that this education creates broader foundations for the cultivation of the person as a citizen, for their adaptation to changing social and political conditions, and serves to accelerate and shape socialization and civic value orientation. At the same time, it includes ethical, aesthetic, legal, ecological, general educational, health, physical education, philosophical, religious, political, civic and social dimensions (Palán, 2002; Palán, Langer, 2008). It is also one of the effective instruments for addressing the problems of the insufficient functioning of contemporary democracies and current social issues (e.g., Smékal et al., 2010; Kopecký, 2013; Strouhal, 2013; Veteška, 2016).
Current issues of adult civic education
Given its outlined significance, it is surprising that andragogical research, at least the Slovak one, and apart from a few exceptions such as Krystoň, Sládkayová (2018), Sládkayová, Krystoň (2019), Sládkayová (2019a; 2019b; 2017), Drobná (2010), does not give this field due attention. From our perspective, this is also surprising because digital transformation is already in full force and touches all social systems, including political systems: election campaigns are full of “bots” and “big data” analyses, journalism is full of “leaks” and “fake news”, and new digital participatory models are fundamentally changing political communication and decision-making. These new phenomena and mechanisms simultaneously bring a high degree of uncertainty. Handling this requires, among other things, media literacy and the ability to think critically. Against this background, the aims of adult civic education and media education overlap.
In this article, therefore, we want to focus the attention of the andragogical community on the need for systematic examination of adult civic education. This need is all the more urgent because our societies are insufficiently prepared to face new problems, among which we currently consider the phenomenon known as fake news to be the most serious. The reason is that fake news, i.e., “information that intentionally imitates the format of news or another journalistic product, while their creators intentionally mislead their audience by distorting reality” (Short Dictionary of Hybrid Threats, 2021), affects the global information space, disrupts open, free and fair public debate, which is fundamental to all democratic societies. In addition, social crises and stress-inducing events, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, only facilitate the spread of fake news and a wide variety of conspiracy theories, because these can help people cope with anxiety and a loss of control (see, for example, Šrol, Ballová Mikušová, Čavojová, 2021).
A particularly dangerous subgroup of fake news is so-called disinformation, that is, false information spread with intent to harm (for detailed treatments of disinformation, its mechanisms and effects, and possible strategies for addressing it, see e.g. European Commission, 2018a; 2018b; 2020; Hajdu et al., 2020a; 2020b; Reuters Institute, 2017; Wardle, Derakhshan, 2017; World Health Organization, 2020). Their main danger arises from the unprecedented expansion of social media and the low level of users’ media literacy.
The development of media literacy is therefore one of the necessary conditions for adults to be able to identify threats arising not only from false reports but also from so-called cyberbullying, radicalization, or internet crime and to become resistant to them. Adults should also be able to confront and address these problems.
Media literacy is in fact about more education than media themselves. Teaching through media is not media literacy. Neither is media production, although media literacy should include it as well. Media literacy is also criticism of media and means thinking critically (Bisovsky, 2018).
Critical thinking—that is, using logic and argumentation to identify strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions, or approaches to solving problems—is a skill of key significance not only within media literacy but also on the labor market (e.g., World Economic Forum, 2020).
Given these facts, it is hard to understand that the issue of developing media literacy and critical thinking is not yet a common part of andragogical discourse (about adult civic education) even today. Attention in this direction is mainly directed toward children and youth. This is also confirmed by a report of the European Audiovisual Observatory titled Analysis of practices and measures supporting media competence (2016), according to which only very few countries offer adults educational activities for developing their media competencies.
Moreover, in Slovakia there are still no “train-the-trainer” educational programmes aimed at teaching practical skills and methods to educators for developing adults’ media literacy and critical thinking. It is necessary to increase lecturers’ sensitivity to different kinds of fake news and train them to identify such information. Lecturers should also know the ways fake news spreads and its impacts on people’s lives and democratic societies. Lastly, it is necessary that in education and counselling they themselves are able to use and/or produce media while being capable of critical reflection.
Another equally serious challenge that our societies currently have to face—and that would undoubtedly deserve attention in andragogical research—is the already mentioned COVID-19 pandemic. The measures adopted to manage it inflict another severe blow to democracy, which is already in crisis in Europe for years. They are implemented primarily through decrees and orders that require citizens to be responsible and stay home. Yet the structural framework conditions are usually not discussed—Michel Foucault would call this a biopolitical regime. Besides protecting the population, “covid politics” also brings massive restrictions of basic rights (see Luksik, Vater, 2021).
In addition, it is not entirely clear on what this policy is based, because the boundary between “legitimate” expert facts, opinions and religious systems is visibly blurred. At the same time, media-fueled polarization between “COVID deniers,” “anti-vaccination groups,” “conspiracy believers,” and “enlightened,” “responsible” and “reasonable” people hides fundamental deformations, differences and contradictions that the pandemic has only intensified. It seems that western European democracies are losing space for discussion and consensus-building. More and more people feel that only their own views are fact-based, valuable and acceptable, of course not only on questions of “covid lockdown” (ibid.).
Incidentally, lockdown and the associated closure of educational institutions, despite digital technologies and possibilities they offer, significantly complicated critical discussion of the crisis and crisis management policy. Adult civic education, whose character is strongly social and community-oriented, lost an important space due to lockdown and is now itself in a crisis.
Current tasks and questions of adult civic education
From what has been stated so far, there are many tasks for the theory and practice of adult civic education whose fulfilment also presumes systematic andragogical research. In relation to the phenomenon of fake news, this research should, in our view, focus primarily on:
- Identifying and analyzing the current state or level of theoretical elaboration and practical realization of adult civic education in Slovakia and possibilities for its development, reflecting current social problems and developmental trends.
- Analyzing fake news as a social phenomenon from the perspectives of different disciplines, i.e., examining its various aspects as a basis for an interdisciplinary approach and integrating the results of those analyses into andragogical theory.
- Identifying and analyzing theoretical and practical approaches to developing media literacy and critical thinking among adults used at home and abroad to reduce the influence of fake news.
- Creating a model for the development of adults’ media literacy and critical thinking. Such a model would also serve as a basis for designing specific intervention approaches (that is, educational, counseling and informational approaches) for developing media literacy and critical thinking for selected adult target groups and selected educational institutions. One group that in the context of the spread of fake news and the development of media literacy and critical thinking deserves andragogists’ attention is teachers. Up to 31% of teachers of lower secondary schools believe that vaccination against the coronavirus is preparation for implanting chips into people. Up to 39% believe that regular mask wearing has negative health consequences. These results come from the latest representative Focus survey, carried out for the party Spolu and EPP (Spolu Party, 2020). Other research findings indicate that up to 53% of teachers would recommend the magazine Zem a vek to their students as a reliable medium (Piško, 2020; Goda, 2019). Another important target group from our perspective is young adults aged 18 to 24, who according to the Reuters Institute (2017) use social media as their main source of news. It is reasonable to assume that social isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic substantially intensifies this trend. It is precisely social media, together with new technologies, that enable the spread of fake news (primarily disinformation), with hitherto unprecedented speed and extraordinary targeting accuracy (for example, European Commission, 2018).
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we believe, it would also have been necessary to take account of at least the following topical areas and questions (similar to Luksik, Vater, 2021).
Adult civic education during the COVID-19 pandemic
- What tasks for adult education arise from confrontation with “pandemic politics”? How can emergency governance be reconciled with democracy and with basic legislative and constitutional rights?
- Is it possible during COVID-19 to speak of a radicalization of shifting responsibility onto individuals (including for one’s own health)? What role does adult education play in this? Is it being reduced to some form of self-optimization? What objections can be raised?
- What does the loss of the democratic right to assemble mean? How can adult education help create awareness of basic democratic rights?
Adult civic education and questions of “critique”
- Is the task of adult education to promote solidarity and conformity, or conversely resistance/protest and criticism toward forms of government and pandemic-related regulations?
- What might a solidaristic and democratic form of critique look like, and how can adult education support it?
- How can adults be helped to become critical and emancipated under conditions of “post-truth,” fake news, alternative facts, COVID-19, and stay-at-home bans? What roles for adult education arise in this context?
Transformation of adult civic education and new opportunities
- Which new forms of gathering and organization—and thus potentially new places of adult education—arose during the crisis?
- Which new adult education networks emerged during and through the crisis, and which instead disappeared? What role do technology and digitization play in this? Do they bring new opportunities for participation, or do they contribute to exclusion?
- Can COVID-19 be understood as an opportunity for politicization in the sense of awakening interest in questions of governance? Who should be responsible for critical adult education?
Conclusion
The aim of this article is to direct the attention of the Slovak andragogical community to the importance of adult civic education and the need for its systematic investigation. This need is all the more urgent because our society is insufficiently prepared to face new problems, among which we currently regard “fake news” and the COVID-19 pandemic as the most serious. Their social and political consequences are so severe that adult civic education, as one area of study in (civic enlightenment) andragogy, must not only incorporate them into its themes but also develop concrete concepts, strategies and interventions to develop alternatives to the existing system and social structures, as well as to develop and consolidate democracy and adults’ democratic thinking.
Naturally, the social and political consequences of “fake news” and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the tasks and questions associated with them, cannot be handled only within one discipline. They have many psychological, social, economic, political, legal and other aspects, which are addressed by other disciplines and which andragogy must include in its reflections. These facts justify the need to create effective interdisciplinary solutions. Andragogy can assist in this respect in that it “seeks to transform the life problems of the individual and society into problems solvable through learning” (Beneš 2014, p. 18). It is clear that neither learning itself nor adult civic education can fully eliminate the influence of these issues on society; however, the development of media literacy, critical thinking, various forms of active citizenship and democratic coexistence and so on is not possible without learning, education and their systematic support.
Author: Mgr. Martin Schubert, PhD. Katedra andragogiky, Pedagogická fakulta, Univerzita Mateja Bela v Banskej Bystrici
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