No Direction Home: A Book Review Essay
Abstract
10.1177/0741713605280178ADULT EDUCATION QUARTERLY / November 2005BOOK REVIEW ESSAY NO DIRECTION HOME: A BOOK REVIEW ESSAY Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education, edited by Arthur L. Wilson and Elisabeth R. Hayes. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000. 735 pp., $67 (hardcover). Adult and Continuing Education: Major Themes in Education, Vols. 1-5, edited by Peter Jarvis with Colin Griffin. New York: Routledge, 2003. $850 (hardcover). These two collections contain some of the most thoughtful writing about the function and practice of adult and continuing education in the past 300 years. Chronologically, they dove- tail nicely: Jarvis and Griffin's collection covers the period from the 18th century to the 1990s; Wilson and Hayes's Handbook takes over there to close the 20th century. Although each collection has been available for some time and reviewed separately before, consider- ing them now in tandem provides an opportunity to explore more broadly the approaches and issues that have consistently engaged the field's scholars and practitioners. As I will show, they reveal contemporary appreciations of adult education that either claim or seek connec- tion and solidarity with the past. Indeed, adult education's past is often represented as an ontologically more secure home from which the modern profession isevolving.