Understanding the Educational Barriers in Terms of the Bounded Agency Model

Marko Radovan Summary:

Summary:  The author describes the problems of participation in adult education from the perspective of educational barriers. Reasons for greater or lesser willingness of adults to participate in education can be interpreted in two ways: psychologically and sociologically. The former describes a particular aspect of the internal factors of motivation for education; in the latter, an understanding is based on the external conditions under which a person participates in education. The results of empirical research often question the usefulness of understanding of barriers by focusing only on the individual’s understanding of the world. However, one of the possible ways to understand the impact of educational barriers on participation is to take into consideration the broader structural conditions and measures by which governments seek to increase opportunities for education and to analyse the interaction between them and the individual’s conceptual apparatus. On this basis, Rubenson & Desjardins developed a “Bounded Agency Model” in which they illustrate the impact of the welfare state model to overcome educational barriers.