Stewart, David Wood, 1929-

David W. Stewart

David W. Stewart is a consultant, columnist and author, university instructor, policy analyst, workshop leader, and public speaker in adult education. He was Director of Program Development at the Center for Adult Learning and Educational Credentials at the American Council on Education and President of the Coalition of Adult Education Organizations (CAEO) in 1988-1989. He served as a member of the Planning Committee for the First World Conference on Lifelong Learning held in Rome in 1994.

As President of CAEO, he helped organize the New Sweden '88 Adult Education Conference in celebration of 350 years of Swedish settlement in America, and organized an exchange visit of Soviet adult educators to the United States under an agreement concluded with Znanie, the official Soviet adult education agency.

He is widely published and the recipient of the Imogene Okes Award for Outstanding Research in Adult Education in 1987 and the Philip Frandson Award for Literature in 1988. He is the principal author of the "Bill of Rights for the Adult Learner" and "Guidelines for Developing and Implementing a Code of Ethics for Adult Educators," and the author of Adult Learning in America: Eduard Lindeman and His Agenda for Lifelong Education .

Eduard Lindeman

Eduard Christian Lindemann (he later dropped the final "n") was born May 9th 1885, in St Clair, Michigan, the tenth child of German-Danish immigrant parents Frederick and Frederecka Johanna Von Piper Lindemann. He attended Michigan Agricultural College (later Michigan State University) where he became involved in the YMCA, developed a writing society and helped to found the Ethnic-Sociological Society. After graduation, he worked with the Boys and Girls Clubs and 4-H as a youth worker and community organizer. He taught at the YMCA College of Chicago for a year and briefly at the North Carolina College for Women in Greensboro, then joined the New York School of Social Work (later the Columbia University School of Social Work) in 1924, where he remained until his retirement in 1950. He became closely associated with the leftist New Republic (whose writers included H. L. Mencken, John Dos Passos, Willa Cather and Michael Gold), served on various commissions, was advisory editor to Mentor Books and was Chair of the American Civil Liberties Union Commission on Academic Freedom (1949).

Over the course of his career, Lindeman published some 200 articles, 107 book reviews, five books, 16 monographs, and 17 chapters in other works. He edited four books, shared joint authorship of another, and gave at least 44 lectures of which some written record remains.

Lindeman's life and work (for he did not separate the two) were not confined within traditional borders; his writing displays a broad viewpoint that encompassed adult education, community organization, politics, sociology and philosophy. Much of his philosophical outlook was shaped by his friend and colleague John Dewey, by Danish philosopher/educator/theologian Nikolai Grundtvig, and by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In her book on him, his daughter Betty writes:

Not only could he relate education, social sciences and social problems to the problems of the day; he could combine concepts from social sciences with both natural sciences and philosophy. He was a pioneer on many interlocking fronts – a pioneer social scientist with an allegiance to both science and to society and its processes, and also a pioneer in adult education and social philosophy. (Leonard 1991: xxiii)

Lindeman was a Progressive; his theories and allegiances did not sit well with some in 1940s America. When he was invited to speak before the Texas State Teachers' Association, a faction attempted to have him removed from the program on the grounds that he was a member of the ACLU and the Committee to Free Earl Browder, and therefore must be a Communist.

Lindeman was not one to separate education from the rest of life. "Education is life," he wrote in The Meaning of Adult Education . He saw adult education not as an end in itself but as a continuous process, arising not from formalized, structured classrooms but from every situation encountered, which had as its purpose to relate the individual to his community and to put meaning into the whole of life. Above all, adult education was a social effort, central to the health and maintenance of democracy. His life and work demonstrate his abiding concern for social justice, a belief in the possibilities of education and human action, and a deep commitment to democracy.