Critique and analysis of andragogy essay samples

In this paper, an analysis and critique of andragogy will be offered. In analyzing andragogy, it is first to be noted that educating adults is not a new phenomenon. In fact, adult education is as old as education itself. It is merely the common assumption that only children, in a pedagogical format, are educated, leads to misconceptions about the benefits of andragogy. However, andragogical practices are not without the need for critical evaluation. So, with this aim and purpose, this paper will lay out general analysis and critique of adult educational practices.
The old adage ” you cannot teach a dog new tricks” unfortunately is a statement that is too often pinned on adult education students. As people get older, and certainly, as they begin to collect skills, behaviors, attitudes, and so on that shape their personalities, they do in fact become shaped in a way that is less transient than youth. However, the difference between an adult in a classroom versus a child is that an adult is not transient in the same way a child is transient. A child does not yet know who they are. Education is part of pedagogy because it is about helping children understand themselves against a larger social backdrop. By contrast, adults in a classroom have already achieved self-knowledge and they actually see education as different than children do.
Who is the adult who goes to school? It is not the same as the child. The adult who needs to learn the contents of a biology textbook is different from the young adult (or child) who is learning the fundamentals of biology. This is just one example, but in terms of how biology would be taught for adults who want to be come nurse practitioners, for example, versus a seventeen year old college freshman reveals a salient difference between the two groups. The young college freshman is still in a state of becoming. This is why people say you can teach young dog new tricks. They are learning so as to understand who they will become. This is why pedagogy is so often fraught with uncertainty. This kind of uncertainty does not dominate the mind of the adult, so andragogy is concerned not with the process of becoming, but rather with the process of annexing knowledge and skills onto an existing fully developed adult. The above ideas, then, lead by necessity to the point that adult education requires a fully developed adult in order to function properly.
Andragogy presented to an adult who has not psychologically become an adult will not be as effective. The idea of adult cannot be conflated with age. For example, a college freshman who has developed beyond that of his peers can just as easily benefit from an andragogical framework as an adult outlier who is entering education at the age of forty. Since andragogy focuses on a person’s independence, rather than on dependence, the overall success of anadrogy is completely tied up with a person’s psychological ability to be an adult learner. The rites of passage to adulthood should have already been achieved as milestones in order for the anadrogic student to achieve optimal success.
While in pedagogical terms, the teacher sets the standards for what students ought to learn. However, when in anadrogical context, the student sets his or her own goals for learning. However, this does not mean that the educator is not involved in the students’ learning. The focus just shifts. In fact many values found in anadrogy can also be found in pedagogical approaches. For example, the emphasis on collaboration in learning is often something that advocates of pedagogy value. In sum, an analysis of anadrogy suggests that adults can learn and that, indeed, an old dog can learn new tricks. The takeaway is that in order for anadrogy to work the adult has to be at a psychological state in their own development in order to be independent, self-starting learners.