Global challenges and adult learnings for better future: some reflections

Local and transnational challenges put the planet and its inhabitants at risk while existing democratic regimes are questioned by raising populist and anti-democratic initiatives and warfare attitudes. In this article, I interrogate how adult education can help change people’s minds for better and more peaceful futures, limiting attention to a few poignant challenges of the present: 1) the rise of populism and anti-democratic trends, 2) the emergence of post-truth, and 3) the pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence and conversational agents. I then consider a few types of learning (global citizenship, digital citizenship, and dealing with Artificial Intelligence) that adults need to engage with to live with such challenges while hopefully building better and more peaceful futures. Finally, I consider how adult education is framed by current international policies and the challenges faced by adult education policy at the national level. In short, I argue for a fundamental need to re-state the social purpose of adult education for future policies to help support the learning above-mentioned.