Adult Education and the Formation of Citizens

Book excerpt: Adult Education and the Formation of Citizens turns attention towards normative claims about who adults should become through education, and what capacities and skills adults need to develop to become included in society as ‘full’ citizens. Through these debates, adults are construed as not yet citizens, despite already being citizens in a formal sense; this book problematises such regimes of truth and their related notions of the possibilities and impossibilities of adult education and citizenship. Drawing on empirical examples from the two main adult education institutions in Sweden, folk high schools and municipal adult education, it argues that, through current regimes of truth, these institutions become spaces for the re-shaping of the "abnormal" citizen. The book suggests that only certain futures of citizenship and its educational provision are made possible, while other futures are ignored or even made impossible to imagine. Offering a unique focus on critically problematising the role of adult education in relation to the fostering and shaping of citizens, the book addresses the important contemporary challenges of the role of adult education in a time of migration. Adult Education and the Formation of Citizens will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of adult education, lifelong learning and education.