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The egregious error of adult educators is to define our function solely as one of fostering behavior change and to act as though we believe our principal tasks are to do needs assessment surveys, to communicate ideas and to design exercises to develop specific knowledge, skills or attitudes for prescribed behavior change. Not only does this effort often become indoctrination to engineer consent, but it frequently addresses the wrong reality to begin with.

— Jack Mezirow Perspective Transformation (1978)

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Transformative learning is an adult dimension of reason assessment involving the validation and reformulation of meaning structures.

We all require the meaning perspectives prescribed by our culture, but we have the potentiality of becoming critically aware of our perspectives and of changing them. By doing so, we move from an uncritical organic relationship to a self-consciously contractual relationship with individuals, institutions and ideologies. This is a crucial developmental task of maturity.

Perspective Transformation (1978)

Education cannot be defined by a simplistic preoccupation with fostering direct behavior change, which in many cases exemplifies the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The most significant behavior changes may be functions of perspective transformation, and such transformation is often an essential precondition for meaningful behavior changes.

Perspective Transformation (1978)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jack Mezirow (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.