Learning Out Loud: How a Mixtape Mindset Can Transform Adult Education
Sometimes, wearing my suit, my handmade English shoes and the Black Flag T-shirt underneath my distinguished turtleneck, I feel a bit like Kurt Schwitters once did in his frock coat.1 Respectable on the outside, deliberately subversive at heart. That’s what adult education often feels like to me: we appear structured, planned, secured – but deep down, something is simmering. Or at least, something should be.
Why? Because learning is not a service. And adult education is not a travel agency offering all-inclusive methods.
And yet – we talk about it as if it were. We speak of target groups, offerings, outputs and quality assurance. We organize feedback loops and competence grids, promote mindfulness and teach digital literacy. All of this matters. And yet, something is missing.
Maybe it’s the sound.
Adult education today often resembles a sanitized playlist: balanced, accessible, standardized. But life, learning, and fracture don’t follow a neat dramaturgy. They feel more like a mixtape.2
Handmade. Unpredictable. Contradictory.
A mixtape doesn’t follow a learning path. It has an attitude. It blends. It disrupts. It says: This is what my thinking sounds like.And maybe – just maybe – you’ll find yourself somewhere in it.
What if we started to think of adult education like that again? As an open, contradictory space. As the soundtrack of a learning process that isn’t designed to please – but to transform?
If we truly understand learning as empowerment, then we don’t just need new formats. We need a new way of listening. And – this is my personal conviction – a new kind of disturbance.
Because many formats in adult education today are too smooth. Too consensual. Too tightly planned. They try not to lose anyone – and in doing so, they lose their impact.
What’s missing is the unfinished. The crooked. That offbeat moment that doesn’t quite fit – but somehow stays with you.
Learning Out Loud means:
making the dissonant audible
holding space for the uncertain
allowing the questions that don’t come with a certificate.
It’s not about shouting against the system. It’s about shifting its frequencies.
Adult education was never just about knowledge transfer. It has always been a space for democratic resonance. A place of self-empowerment. Of irritation. Of counter-narratives.
That’s why we need a new sound:
Less PowerPoint, more record players.
Less canon, more remix.
Less output logic, more sonic tension.
Adult education can be beautiful – of course it can – but it must not beautify. It can bring structure – but not smoothing. It can support – but not override.
Maybe the best course isn’t a course at all. Maybe it’s just a space where someone dares to think out loud for the very first time. A noise that isn’t immediately streamlined. A contradiction that doesn’t get managed away.
And maybe we don’t need a new concept – just a mixtape.
One that starts off-key, grows loud, pauses – and then finds exactly the note someone’s been searching for.
Learning Out Loud.
Because the world doesn’t work in modules – it works in moments.
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¹ Kurt Schwitters, German Dadaist in a frock coat, created the “Merzbau", a new form of collage somewhere between architecture, wordplay, and protest against structure. If you’ve ever worked in education, you know the feeling: arranging fragments that never quite fit, and still hoping to build a space where thought becomes possible.
² Dear members of Generation Z: A mixtape in the 1980s was the analog version of a Spotify playlist – but with more patience, more heart, and fewer algorithms. You recorded it on cassette tape, in real time, track by track. Every pause, every sudden volume change was an expression of attitude. Mixtapes weren’t products. They were love letters. Or protests. Or both.
