Selling Self-Help to African Americans

Paper Summary:

This paper outlines the basic principles of self-help philosophy and apply those principles to African-American Adult education. It specifically looks at the positive and negative impacts of a self-awareness driven along racial lines and how these impacts can alter the personal growth and development of African Americans seeking adult education.

From the Paper:

"Contemporary self-help developments vary from weekly support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous to such popular relationship-coaching books as 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'. Although the self-help phenomenon may seem a recent one, it in fact began nearly one hundred and fifty years ago with Samuel Smiles release in 1859 of Self-help (Self-help, 2005, sec. History). Self-help was the defining text of a new movement to help through education and empowerment. Even the best institutions can give a man no active help. Perhaps the most they can do is, to leave him free to develop himself and improve his individual condition (Smiles as cited in Halsall, 1998, para. 3). "Self-help" as Smiles defined it did not, however, become a popular idea involving successful cultural institutions until the release of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics in 1950 (Self-help, 2005, sec. History)."

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