Broadly speaking, liberty is the ability to do as one pleases, or a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant (i.e. privilege). It is a synonym for the word freedom. ... Thus liberty entails the responsible use of freedom under the rule of law without depriving anyone else of their freedom.
Social reform has long been a goal of adult education, and those critics who see Mezirow as neglecting the social change aspect of transformation suggest that social reform needs to precede individual transformation. Mezirow (2000) distinguishes between educational tasks (helping people become aware of oppressive structures and learn how to change them) and political tasks (forcing economic change). It is his goal to help individuals learn how to create social change rather than to create social change himself. Others see this differently.
Brookfield (2003) proposes that the purpose of transformative learning is ideology critique, a process that helps “people uncover and challenge dominant ideology and then learn how to organize social relations according to noncapitalist logic” (p. 224). He holds that transformation includes not only the individual's structural change, but also structural change in the social world. Similarly, Newman (1994) emphasizes that we should study not the oppressed, but oppression itself. Writers and theorists who advocate social change as a goal of transformative learning (and adult education as a whole) do not dismiss individual learning and transformation, but see it as the educator's goal to address the social context within which individuals live and learn.
