The article presents selected views of Hans Tietgens, one of the most important representative of adult education research and practice in Germany in the second half of the 20th century. In Tietgens' conception the constitutive feature of adult education is a search. The adults in a disorientation situation are searching for a possibility of organized learning in order to recover the orientation and certainty. The planning of education offers is a kind of searching too. There is the point to meet individual needs and social demands. The people searching for a suitable offer can go wrong so they need help and the correct planning of offers should make easier the searching and finding process. The participants oriented adult education and professionalism make possible the each other finding of the searching people and an offer. According to Hans Tietgens adult education offer should be addressed to all social groups. He underlined the importance of using biographic research in adult education that helps to understand individual cases what is the basis of adult education. Hans Tietgens died in Mai 2009, he was a researcher and practitioner whose work has had a great influence on the development of adult education theory and practice in Germany.
The aim of this article is to present the concept of intergenerational education in Germany in the context of the solidarity idea. As challenge for intergenerational education the authoress describes the demographic change in Germany and their consequences for intergenerational relationships. So one of the main aims of the intergenerational education is to build positive relationships between different generations. The intergenerational relationships are describes in the article both in the micro dimension (family) and in the macro dimension (society). Then the authoress presents the idea of solidarity, which is the base of the intergenerational education concept. In conclusion she underlines, that for intergenerational relationships is ambivalence typical and the building of positive relations between generations requires to manage with ambivalence. Solidarity can be an effect of constructive managing with ambivalence in intergenerational relations.
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