“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Derek Bok
The need for learning is a fundamental element of human existence, and the right, which is also a duty, to education is an important tool for shaping our destiny. We are not mere recipients of social changes but active subjects, continuously interacting with our social environment and contributing to the formation of social reality. We need to understand so that we can constantly evolve and adapt.
Therefore, Adult Education is essential for self-development, our relationships with society, and society itself. As it has been said, if Life is a complex theatrical performance, the Director may be Education… As long as it is shared justly and does not end up, in the field of Education, as a mechanism of exclusion, depriving individuals, groups, and society as a whole of the potential opportunities that rightfully belong to us.
As long as the alienations we address in this book are 'testimonies' of a distorted social participation and adulthood, subject to political, social, and cultural stereotypes, the efforts against them are themselves a testimony against the 'purified cannibalism' that can operate in 'civilized spaces,' and an indication of a nature and an education more complex than the boxes of official rhetoric desire.
But it is also a testament to pedagogy that refuses to relinquish its obligation to contribute to a fairer world. Its contradictory, difficult, exciting yet hopeful journey, which has marked us for centuries, was well described by Campbell when he wrote: “Not everyone has a destiny. Only those who struggle create their own.”
