| Alain Leroy Locke was born in 1886, during the post-reconstruction era and died in 1954, a month before the Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Raised by his mother following the early death of his father, Locke demonstrated academic talent as a student at Central High School and later in the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy.;An important leader of African-American adult education within the American Association of Adult Education (AAAE), he served on the AAAE executive board for fifteen years and was the organization's national president in 1946-47. Emphasizing the importance of cultural development among African Americans, Locke's concept of adult education was shaped by his philosophy of cultural pluralism as a means to combat racism and ethnocentrism. A major role of adult education, in his view, was to attenuate the hostilities and tensions among diverse racial, ethnic, and religious groups so as to promote a genuinely democratic society. This position placed him at odds with the predominant ideological and educational thinking within the AAAE as well as among other African-American adult educators.;Locke's involvement with the Harlem and Atlanta experiments in "Negro adult education," the Associates in Negro Folk Education, and the conferences on Adult Education and the Negro during the 1930s, offers evidence that his philosophy of cultural pluralism provided a theoretical framework for shaping his proposals for adult education theory and practice. This work also helps to understand why his relationship to the adult education movement is understood as peripheral to the leaders of the adult education movement.;During the 1940s, Locke turned his intellectual efforts toward a re-examination of some of the principal features of his cultural pluralism. Locke reconceptualized his cultural pluralism such that clear emphasis was placed upon the rights of cultural minorities within a democracy and provided for a new approach to intercultural understanding and cooperation that Locke termed "critical relativism." (Abstract shortened by UMI.).;Entering Harvard University in 1904, he was a student of idealist philosopher Josiah Royce. Following graduation and a tour of European study as the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, Locke earned his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. During the 1920s, he was an intellectual leader of the Harlem Renaissance. |
