Why I Hate "Program Planning" (Part 3)

When Knud Illeris wrote about education’s “sorting function” (Illeris, 2007, p. 237), he was primarily concerned with role that education plays in the replication of social inequity from one generation to the next; but, when I read the phrase, I thought of another reason why I don’t like the phrase “program planning.”

Why I Hate "Program Planning" (Part 2)

I just finished reading Thomas J. Sork’s chapter in the 2000 edition of the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education. If I had encountered this work a few months earlier, perhaps I would not have started this serial rant on “program planning.” Don’t get me wrong—I still don’t like the phrase “program planning,” and there is plenty about the way adult education conceptualizes it that sticks in my craw—but there is something about Sork’s treatment of the subject that makes it more palatable and even interesting to me.

I first started feeling uneasy with “program planning” when I picked up Caffarella’s textbook (2002). As I skimmed the table of contents, I wondered, “What does this have to do with adult education?” Most of the topics I found there—except, perhaps, the one on learning transfer—looked as though they would have been just as at home in a course on convention planning or hotel management. It seemed so event-oriented and—though Caffarella does not espouse a linear interpretation of her Interactive Model of Program Planning—so formulaic.