Beyond Learning: Adult Education as Infrastructure of an Adaptive Society

Jeff McCarthy

Athabasca University

MAIS644: Adult Education, Community Leadership and Society

Critical Reflective and Personal Position Paper

Instructor: Dr. Russell Wilde

08.02.2026

Introduction

I entered MAIS 644 with a practical understanding of adult education.   As the Executive Director of an employment, training, and development agency, I viewed its purpose through the work I perform every day: helping people develop skills, overcome barriers, find employment, and participate more fully in their communities.  I believed adult education strengthened individuals, organizations, and our local economy.  I still believe this to be true. 

What changed throughout this course was not those beliefs or lived experiences, but my understanding of their significance and place within a larger human systems design.  I began to see that adult education has the potential to do more than just prepare people for work or help them respond to changing labour market conditions.  At its best, it helps individuals and communities deal with change, question assumptions, engage across differences and socio-economic silos and respond thoughtfully to problems that have no easy or permanent solutions.  When I began exploring complexity as a research interest, I never expected adult education to present itself as such an important part of the answer, to the point of being a panacea.  As our work and my thinking and reflections evolved, I found myself wondering less about the differences between educational philosophies and more about how they all work together to collectively move us forward.  What role should adult education intentionally play in helping society adapt to increasing complexity?  That question ultimately became the nucleus of this reflection and a consideration for further research.

Looking deeper, I also found that these ideas have deep roots in educational philosophy.   Long before modern-day discussions of complexity, pandemics, or artificial intelligence, John Dewey famously theorized that education was about far more than just preparation for life.  Even at the turn of the last century, scholars were pushing education to reach for more, positing that learning occurs through experience, inquiry, participation, and democratic process rather than the passive transmission of knowledge.  Although society has endured multiple wholesale changes since Dewey wrote, his central insights remain remarkably relevant and obvious.  If societies must continually adapt, education must also continue to evolve through forms of shared experience and inquiry.  Through all this change and adaptation, I contend that education must be designed to meet the challenges it faces.   

Adult education has always been in a state of evolution.  From one-room schoolhouses to the Ivy League, to correspondence courses, to online and distance education, each new structure seems to increase access to learning and essential skills.  Yet these developments have focused primarily on how education reaches us rather than on why it does.  Allan Bloom (1987) warned that education had already become too transactional, concentrating on immediate skill needs while neglecting the broader educational tradition and democratic purpose.  If complexity has become one of the defining characteristics of the threats facing modern society, perhaps adult education's next evolution is to intentionally strengthen the adaptive capacity of individuals, organizations, and communities.

This reflection also connects to a companion paper I am completing in MAIS 601, which explores what theories from multiple disciplines collectively teach us about adaptability in an increasingly complex world.  That work suggests no single discipline or way of knowing is sufficient to understand today's challenges.   Fortunately, that conversation leads to where this paper begins, asking what role adult education should intentionally play in helping individuals and communities develop that adaptive capacity.

If adaptability depends on learning to see complexity from multiple perspectives, what role should adult education play in helping individuals and communities develop that capacity?  My position is that adult education should be understood and intentionally designed as part of the social infrastructure of an adaptive society.  This form of adaptation elevates adult education to the position it must occupy to be effective or to elicit change.  Its importance lies not only in what learners know but also in how learning is designed, where it occurs, whose knowledge is deemed important, and whether it strengthens people's and communities' ability to continue learning together.  That design or collaborative effort, I have come to believe, may be just as important as the outcomes.  Imagine a world in which municipal budgets considered dialogue around what we need to share and learn together. 

The Shift(s)

Adult Education Beyond Employment

I now know that I viewed adult education through the lens of my own work.  As Executive Director of an employment, training, and development agency, I naturally associated it with employability, workforce participation, and economic opportunity.  Success is measured by regulated outcomes: skills acquired, credentials earned, barriers reduced, and the number of people my agency can report to the government as having found meaningful employment.  Those outcomes remain important, and nothing I encountered during this course lessened that value.  If anything, certain readings reinforced the important role of adult education in supporting both economic and social outcomes (White & King, 2017).

What changed as my research interest sharpened was my sense of what we’re trying to accomplish within the broader societal picture.  Somewhere along the way, I came to ask whether our programs should aim to do more and, in doing so, become even more successful in achieving our regulated outcomes. 

From Either/Or to Both/And

            The Structured Academic Controversy assignment was an important turning point in our dialogue regarding economic and social development.  I expected that we would have to choose between them.  Instead, the literature suggested they were connected.

Until this course, despite countless professional considerations, I don't think I had ever thought that my own work reflected a particular educational philosophy, regrettably.  Looking back now, I can see that much of employment and training is grounded in a behaviourist approach.  Success is defined by the KPI’s measured: the skills people acquire, program enrolment, credentials earned, and most commonly, the percentage of learners securing meaningful employment.  We program and measure these things because they matter to learners, organizations, and governments.  They still matter.

What continues to surprise me is how often these same ideas resurface throughout my interdisciplinary studies.  Whether discussing leadership, complexity, organizational learning, or adult education, I keep encountering scholars and classmates pointing to a similar conclusion in one form or another: people learn best through experience, participation, and engaging with real problems through their own voiced perspectives.  Based on a cursory exploration of Dewey’s work, these are not novel ideas.  

The more we read, the harder it became to separate employment from community development.  Helping someone find meaningful employment can also strengthen confidence and inclusion.  In the same way, stronger and more resilient communities create better opportunities for individuals (White & King, 2017; Torres & Schugurensky, 1994; Elfert & Walker, 2020)

I therefore did not leave the assignment rejecting the reports and measurable outcomes I have to swear by in favour of progressive learning.  As many classmates discussed, I also came away with a both/and position.  Adult education should produce those essential, practical, everyday results, but it should also strengthen the capacity of individuals and communities to create a culture of learning.  In my SAC reflection, I described this as a “win-win-win”: individuals, communities, and governments benefit.

Wicked Problems Change the Question

A noticeable shift I experienced during our exploration of wicked problems further connected my interest in complexity.  Wicked problems resist definitive solutions (Sork, 2021).  They evolve, involve competing interests and values, and create new challenges even as existing ones are being addressed.  In my own research, this resembles Taleb's (2007) description of Black Swan events.  Carcasson and Sprain (2012) make similar points, arguing that these issues require ongoing dialogue, learning, and collaboration rather than technical expertise by itself.

Reflecting on my own experience in the New Brunswick Health Emergency Operations Centre during the pandemic, I easily recognized the same situation.  The pandemic and now artificial intelligence, the new (economic) world order, political polarization, among other complex problems, all demand gargantuan, continual learning rather than a heroic leader’s one-time fix that never comes.  The realization came quickly that adult education has a larger role to play in preparing society to respond to multiple interconnected problems that increase in layered complexity over time. 

That distinction clearly marks a turning point in my thinking and a definitive connection to my work searching theory (MAIS 601) for insights into dealing with complexity.  Adult education finds itself once again no longer simply about transferring knowledge or developing skills.  It must rise again to become part of the process through which individuals, organizations, and communities develop the capacity to learn, adapt, and respond together in an increasingly complex world.

Adult Education as Adaptive Capacity

By the end of MAIS 644, I no longer saw adult education as simply another public service or extension of the Department of Education, Training and Labour.  If adaptability depends on our ability to continue learning, then adult education may be one of the primary ways society builds its capacity to respond to change and complexity.  This is where the question explored in my MAIS 601 companion paper leads: what role should adult education intentionally play in developing that capacity?

What I hadn't appreciated before this course was the magnitude that adult education is actually capable of.  Rather than the narrow scope of preparing people to solve a set of problems, it can prepare them to continue learning as problems and conditions evolve, creating societal resiliency.  Employment, leadership, literacy, and community participation remain essential outcomes, but perhaps they are no longer the whole story.  What matters just as much is what people are armed with once the textbook closes.  Are they better able to interpret unfamiliar situations?  Can they disagree and move a conversation forward?  Can they work across perspectives and differences?  Are they more willing to question assumptions and continue learning when their bias no longer fits?  Are they capable of building on a foundation of learning?  Again, those are the qualities I suspect many emergency managers and community leaders found themselves wishing for throughout the pandemic.  They seem no less important as artificial intelligence, political polarization, and other forms of increasing complexity continue to challenge our worldview.

Looking back, I realize that this understanding ties together many of the ideas we explored throughout the course.  Workforce development, democratic participation, community leadership, social movements, and futures literacy are not competing outcomes of adult education.  They are different expressions of the same underlying issue: helping individuals and communities remain capable of learning, adapting, and moving forward.   Adult education prepares people not only for the next challenge, but for a lifetime of learning through challenges that cannot be fully anticipated, our future Black Swans.

The Design May Be Just as Important as the Outcomes

One assumption from this course has stayed with me: perhaps the design may be just as important as the outcomes.  At first, I simply thought this was a rumination on educational practice.  But perhaps it reaches further.  It seemingly challenges the assumption that educational success can be measured only by what learners know or can do at the end of a program.

Outcomes still matter.  Adult education should continue helping people find employment, strengthen organizations, develop leadership, and participate more fully in their communities.  But if many of society's challenges are adaptive rather than technical (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009), then we should also ask different questions.  Did the learning experience encourage curiosity and reflection?  Did it expose participants to different perspectives?  Did it build relationships that continue after direct learning practice ended?  Did it leave people better prepared to learn together when the next unexpected challenge arrives?

Throughout this course, our readings consistently suggested that meaningful learning emerges through dialogue, shared experience, and participation in community life (Walker & Butterwick, 2021; Ramdeholl & Jeremic, 2021).  Educational design, therefore, is not simply about how to instruct.  It is about creating a culture or conditions in which individuals and communities become better at learning together.

From Educational Programs to Adaptive Infrastructure

Throughout the pandemic, planning cell managers came to regard the implementation of community communications as ‘infrastructure’ meant to combat misinformation and misinterpretation.  I find myself wondering whether adult education serves a similar purpose.  Perhaps a refocused contribution is not simply preparing people for work or greater participation, but helping individuals and communities continue learning, interpreting change, and adapting together.

Throughout MAIS 644 we explored adult education as workforce development, community development, democratic practice, leadership development, and social transformation.  Initially, these appeared to be separate purposes.  By the end of the course, I saw them as different expressions of the same underlying potential.  Each strengthens society's capacity to learn, collaborate, and adapt.

Implications for the Future of Adult Education

Learning Across the Lifespan

Another of the clearest insights I take from this course is that lifelong learning may no longer be simply an educational aspiration; it is becoming a necessity.

I imagine that education was historically often regarded as preparation for adulthood.  People acquired knowledge early in life before applying it throughout their careers and community life.  Continuing education existed, but perhaps mostly to update skills or support career advancement.

This model seems inadequate today.  Artificial intelligence, demographic change, shifting labour markets, public health crises, and political polarization all require individuals and communities to continually interpret new information and question all of our assumptions.   Learning is becoming less about occasional updates to knowledge and skills and more about developing the capacity to navigate continual change.  Our pandemic experience and current threat horizon suggest that we also need to consider helping people learn how to connect, share, and think.  Complexity begs that of us, and education can be a powerful measure to mitigate risk. 

This idea runs through many of the themes we explored in MAIS 644.  Whether discussing workforce development, citizenship, community leadership, or futures literacy, the underlying challenge remained the same: we cannot predict the future, but we can strengthen our ability to respond to it.  Adult education is vital infrastructure not because it prepares people for every challenge, but because it prepares them to keep learning as those challenges arise.

Communities Become the Classroom

This course also changed how I think about where meaningful adult learning occurs.  Through my work, I associate adult education primarily with the classrooms, workshops, and formal programs for which my Director of Learning provides curriculum and schedules. Those settings remain important, but they are only part of a lopsided picture.  I now see community organizations, workplaces, volunteer groups, municipalities, social movements, Indigenous communities, gatherings, shared spaces and a multitude of informal networks as places where adults learn together.

Walker and Butterwick (2021) argue that some of the most significant adult learning occurs beyond bricks and mortar, developing instead through participation in community life, social movements, and the many forms of collective action.  I also recognize this in my work at Jobs Unlimited.  While we deliver employment programming through structured courses and workshops, the most meaningful learning undeniably occurs where we foster the greatest inclusion and build relationships.  Looking back on what I’ve learned, I now recognize that these experiences are not simply add-ons, qualities of a good instructor, or enhancements to our very formal methods of education; they are the essential tenets of adult education itself, required for greater success, and we should regard them as starting points, impacting design.    

Agencies like mine should matter considerably in discussions of infrastructure, but this course reinforces for me that adaptive capacity is built just as much in communities as in classrooms.  Foundational to this, Weick (1995) also shows that people most commonly and effectively make sense of uncertainty together, while Gadamer (2004) argues that understanding develops through our interpretation of shared experiences.  These ideas and their application help us see adult education in a much broader light.  I have come to believe that it functions as social infrastructure because it creates the conditions for people and communities to connect, learn, and make sense of things together.  In doing so, it strengthens society's adaptive capacity.

Measuring Everything That Matters

This course also prompted me to reconsider how we evaluate success in adult education.  Traditional measures remain important.  Employment outcomes, credentials, literacy gains, and program completion rates all tell my funders and regulators whether programs are meeting their intended objectives.  

At the same time, again, they fail to capture the whole story.   If adult education contributes to society's adaptive capacity, then some of its most important results may only become visible over time.  We might also eventually ask whether learners became more confident, more willing to engage with different perspectives, or better connected to relationships that support continued learning.  We might ask whether organizations became better at learning together, whether they developed organizational memory, or whether communities strengthened their ability to coordinate, share, and respond collectively to challenges.  These outcomes are certainly difficult to measure, but they may be a much better reflection of a truer essence and intention of adult education.  Rather than replacing all the standard measures of success, I believe we need to redefine what success looks like.  My agency has completed many cycles of quarterly reports to government, but none have concluded whether we are making any long-term difference or effect or whether a single student fell in love with learning.    

I am reminded of a recent town hall meeting in my community.  Municipal leaders sought feedback on a contentious expropriation matter (NB Provincial Exhibition).  After presenting a brief background and context on the matters at hand, microphones were handed to the citizens present.  Before this course, I may not have thought or cared about any order of these proceedings.  Upon completion of this course, and with the questions that remain, I recognize that an opportunity was lost to educate those present on due process and civic responsibility, if not, at the very least, on history or on how our community learns and remembers.  I recognize that an opportunity was lost to continually strengthen civic discourse because we do not take adult education to community in earnest and with intention.

Conclusion

As I reflect on MAIS 644, I realize the greatest change was not what I learned about adult education, but how I now understand its purpose.  I began this course viewing adult education primarily through my own professional practice.   Those purposes remain essential.  What changed was the realization that they are part of a bigger, and perhaps more vital, worldview.

Throughout our discussions of community leadership, democratic participation, wicked problems, and futures literacy, I came to see adult education less as a collection of programs and more as part of the social infrastructure through which democratic societies develop the capacity to respond to complexity and rapid change.  All the traditional markers remain important, but I believe adult education's greater contribution lies in strengthening society. 

As I conclude this course, I find myself grappling with many ideas, but perhaps most importantly with one notion in particular.  Adaptive capacity has become a concept that, for me, connects leadership, complexity, organizational learning, democracy, and adult education into a single interdisciplinary framework worth pursuing.  Rather than viewing these as separate fields of study, I now understand them as different perspectives on the same fundamental question: how do individuals, organizations, and communities continue learning as the complexity they face grows?  If that question has become the central thread running through my graduate studies, then adult education is no longer simply another subject I studied and reflected on.  It has become, in my view, one of the most important ways democratic societies intentionally nurture the adaptive capacity needed to make our way in an increasingly uncertain and challenging future.

References:

Bloom, A. (1987). The closing of the American mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students. Simon & Schuster.

Carcasson, M., & Sprain, L. (2012). Deliberative democracy and adult civic education. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2012(135), 15–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/ace.20022

Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. D. C. Heath & Co.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. Macmillan.

Elfert, M., & Walker, J. (2020). The rise and fall of adult literacy: Policy lessons from Canada. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 11(1), 109–125. https://doi.org/10.3384/rela.2000-7426.rela9203

Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed., J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1960).

Heifetz, R. A., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.

Ramdeholl, D., & Jeremic, R. (2021). Activism in/and struggle: Teaching for a different world. In T. S. Rocco, M. C. Smith, R. C. Mizzi, L. R. Merriweather, & J. D. Hawley (Eds.), The handbook of adult and continuing education (2020 ed., pp. 362–370). Routledge.

Sork, T. J. (2021). Program planning in an era of "wicked problems." In T. S. Rocco, M. C. Smith, R. C. Mizzi, L. R. Merriweather, & J. D. Hawley (Eds.), The handbook of adult and continuing education (2020 ed., pp. 128–139). Routledge.

Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable. Random House

Torres, C. A., & Schugurensky, D. (1994). The politics of adult education in comparative perspective: Models, rationalities and adult education policy implementation in Canada, Mexico and Tanzania. Comparative Education, 30(2), 131–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305006940300205

Walker, J., & Butterwick, S. (2021). Education to change the world: Learning within/through social movements. In T. S. Rocco, M. C. Smith, R. C. Mizzi, L. R. Merriweather, & J. D. Hawley (Eds.), The handbook of adult and continuing education (2020 ed., pp. 322–329). Routledge.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage Publications.

White, M., & King, S. (2017). Reclaiming Coady: Adult education and economic development in Atlantic Canada. Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 29(2), 53–63. https://doi.org/10.56105/cjsae.v29i2.5364

Appendix “A”: Postscript

Note 1: Upon completion, the MAIS 601 companion paper may be found at JMEPortfolio.com

Note 2: MAIS 644 helped me recognize that my graduate studies are no longer a collection of independent courses but are becoming parts of a coherent interdisciplinary effort.  Looking back, I can now see a clear trajectory emerging across the program: MAIS 602 explored how public institutions learn from complex crises; MAIS 601 asks what theories from across disciplines collectively teach us about adaptability in an increasingly complex world; and this paper argues that adult education is one of the primary ways democratic societies intentionally develop that adaptive capacity.  Only through cohesion and interdisciplinarity have these courses helped clarify a direction and refined a line of questioning and inquiry that will serve me well in MAIS 640.

Note 3: Another question continues to linger after completing this paper that will require further analysis and understanding.  Throughout this reflection, I contend that adult education should be intentionally designed to strengthen society's adaptive capacity.  But by whom?  Who is responsible or even capable of pointing adult education in a direction?  I would like to know how this movement could happen and over what timeline.  What components would have to be comprised and converge to shift the design and endpoints?  If the notion that adult education functions as social infrastructure to address complexity is correct, then perhaps another question is not whether that matters, but who is responsible for intentionally designing/shaping it?  How does meaningful change in adult education occur?