Digitalisation of adult education and hyper-bureaucracy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/CP.2025.i34.v1.02Keywords:
Adult education; Governance; Digital platforms; Bureaucracy; Hyper-bureaucracy.Abstract
This essay problematises the digitalisation of adult education management, including elements such as digital learning, technological applications for teaching and learning, management, evaluation, electronic platforms of various kinds, as well as software aimed at inscribing the universe of adult education in digital world. In terms of governance and management, one of the promises of digitalisation is to reduce bureaucracy. New post-bureaucratic educational organisations would guarantee more freedom, flexibility and choice for adult learners. However, this scenario will be analysed based on a working hypothesis that associates the use of digital machines to govern and organise adult education with the emergence of processes of high rationalisation and formalisation, in an interpretation based on the Weberian theory of bureaucracy. Although it is accepted that the platformisation of adult education contains democratic potential, the text focuses attention on the processes of digital domination and rational-informational authority. Formal rationality has the capacity to produce algorithmic decisions, unprecedented forms of control and surveillance, typical of what the author calls hyper-bureaucracy. The dilemma is that without digitalisation processes we can hardly move forward in adult education as in other fields, but with it we run the risk of moving backwards in human, democratic, and emancipatory terms.
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